Question

I’m doing a small ASP.NET MVC 3 test-app with a bookshelf where I can list “Books”, and loan and return these to/from “Loaners”.

I want to show both my Books and my Loaners on one view, and have therefor created a ViewModel called BooksViewModel but I cannot figure out why i can’t list my “Books”. I can do “foreach(var item in Model)” and only touch “Books” inside it, none of the Books properties.

My Model

namespace MyTest.Models
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Represents a book
    /// </summary>
    public class Book
    {
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Author { get; set; }
        public string ISBN { get; set; }
        public virtual Loaner LoanedTo { get; set; }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Represents a Loaner
    /// </summary>
    public class Loaner
    {
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string Name { get; set; }
        public virtual ICollection<Book> Loans { get; set; }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Bookshelf Database Context
    /// </summary>
    public class BookshelfDb : DbContext
    {
        public DbSet<Book> Books { get; set; }
        public DbSet<Loaner> Loaner { get; set; }
    }     
}

My Controller:

    BookshelfDb bookshelf = new BookshelfDb();

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        var books = from book in bookshelf.Books
                        select book;

        var loaners = from loaner in bookshelf.Loaner
                         select loaner;

        var bookViewModel = new BooksViewModel(books.ToList(),loaners.ToList());

        return View(bookViewModel);
    }

My ViewModel

public class BooksViewModel
{
    public BooksViewModel(List<Book> books, List<Loaner> loaners)
    {
        this.Books = books;
        this.Loaners = loaners;
    }
    public List<Book> Books { get; private set; }
    public List<Loaner> Loaners { get; private set; }
}

My View

@model IEnumerable<MyTest.ViewModels.BooksViewModel>
@foreach (var item in Model.Books)
{
    @item.Title
}

Any hints or code fixes would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Looks to me like you got the type of the model wrong in the view declaration. Try:

@model MyTest.ViewModels.BooksViewModel

@foreach (var item in Model.Books)
{    
   @item.Title
}