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Asked: 2026-05-20T19:22:58+00:00

I’m having a philosophical problem with understanding how to use Models on MVC3. I

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I’m having a philosophical problem with understanding how to use Models on MVC3.
I believe the problem lies from the fact that I come from WebForms :–)

Let’s say I have 10 tables on my DB and as expected when I get them into my EF4, I get those Entity classes that represent the tables (and all their FK integer values).

When I want to display data on the View, I cannot display a select * from table because those FK integers means nothing to my users …and also because some data lies on related tables.

So my understanding is that I can create a Stored Proc, create a Complex Type that represent the actual data to display, coming from separate tables via different SQL joins.

QUESTION 1:
On the view, id MVC compliant to use as @model ..that Complex Type?
or shall I always use Models that are created on the Models folder? And if so, does that mean that I have to replicate the Complex Type on a new model inside the Models folder?

Question 2:
Is this the right way …to create specific SP to collect data that will be displayed or ..is it better to use linq and lambda to be applied to the EF4 Types that come from importing the DB into the EMDX designer.

Thoughts ??
FP

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The correct way is to always define view models. View models are classes which are specifically tailored to the needs of a given view and would be defined in the MVC application tier. Those classes would contain only the properties that would be needed to be displayed by the view. Then you need to map between your domain models (EF autogenerated classes?) and the view models.

    So a controller action would query a repository in order to fetch a domain model, map it to a view model and pass this view model to the view. Top facilitate this mapping you could use AutoMapper. A view shouldn’t be tied to a domain model and always work with a view model. This works also the other way around: a controller action receives a view model from the view as action argument, maps it to a domain model and passes this domain model to the repository in order to perform some action with it (CRUD).

    So a view model could be a class that is mapped from multiple domain models or multiple view models could be mapped to a single domain model. It all depends on how your domain looks like and how do you want to represent the information to the user.

    As far as validation is concerned, I distinguish two types: UI validation and business validation. As an example of UI validation is: a field is required, or a field must be entered in a given format. A business validation is : the username is already taken or insufficient funds to perform wire transfer. UI validation should be done on the view models and business validation on the domain models.

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