Question

I have the following viewmodel,

public class SiteAdminCreateViewModel
{
    public Customer Customer { get; private set; }
    public CustomerSite CustomerSite { get; private set; }
    public SelectList CustomerNames { get; private set; }

    public SiteAdminCreateViewModel(CustomerSite customerSite, Customer customer)
    {
        CustomerSite = customerSite;
        Customer = customer;
        CustomerNames = new SelectList(customer.CustomerName);
    }
}

And the following methods in my repository for returning a list of customers and a list of CustomerSites

 public IQueryable<CustomerSite> GetCustomerSites
    {
        get { return context.CustomerSites; }
    }
    public IQueryable<Customer> GetCustomers
    {
        get { return context.Customers; }
    }

When i instanitiate the viewmodel in my controller im wanting to return the list of customers to passs to the select list in the viewmodel.

 public ViewResult Create() 
    {
        CustomerSite customerSite = new CustomerSite();
        var customer = repository.GetCustomers.ToList();
        return View(new SiteAdminCreateViewModel(customerSite, customer));       
    }

But the return line throws the error

cannot convert from System.Collections.Generic.List’ to ‘CustomerOrders.Domain.Entities.Customer

I think this is because i have the customer variable defined in the Viewmodel of type Customer but im trying to pass a list of customers?

Can anyone offer any advice on where i am going wrong here?

Do i need to define both the Customer type and the CustomerNames select list type in the viewmodel, i defined the Customer Object only so i can use it to pass the Customers to the select list but im not sure if this is the best way to do this?

Any advice anyone can offer for a newbie, will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Your SiteAdminCreateViewModel class’ constructor is defined as follows:

public SiteAdminCreateViewModel(CustomerSite customerSite, Customer customer) {
   ...
}

Its second argument is of type Customer.

You’re passing var customer = repository.GetCustomers.ToList() to it, whose type is List<Customer>.

---

When i instanitiate the viewmodel in my controller im wanting to
return the list of customers to passs to the select list in the
viewmodel.

If I understand what you’re saying correctly, you’re just trying to pass the customers list to build a SelectList.

First of all, you seem to be passing a string to the SelectList constructor. This would not even compile (read System.Web.Mvc.SelectList).

What you’d need to do is change SiteAdminCreateViewModel‘s constructor like

public SiteAdminCreateViewModel(CustomerSite customerSite, IEnumerable<Customer> customers) {
   /* ... */
   CustomerNames = new SelectList(customers, "CustomerId", "CustomerName");
}

CustomerId and CustomerName being properties of the Customer class.