Question

I’m hoping you guys can answer me a question?

I’ve only just started out using ASP.NET MVC3 have come unstuck at a certain point. I’ve been learning this stuff from books and I’m slightly unsure on a few things.

Can a VIEW, only have one @Model reference?

At the moment I have a VIEW setup with a HTTP-POST on a ViewResult, that validates the data in the View, entered by the user and then “on post”, passes this info to a method that writes it back to a database(ADO.NET – Access). Now I need to change my VIEW, so that I can replace a couple of my text boxes for Dropdownlistfor controls. The Data to populate these controls will need to be passed in from the Database.

Would I be correct in saying that this data needs to be passed in the HTTP-GET Viewresult of the page, and if so, can i reference more than one @Model in this same View (*.cshtml).

I have a class that takes in the user response, and this is referenced in the View. But will i need to create a new class for the dropdownlist data and reference that too. So that in the background I populate the data into a SelectListItem, pass it to the View and then populate each drop down control within the view?

I’m sorry if this is poorly written, very hard to explain, I find learning from books hard and I’m pretty stuck now. Any help would be appreciated. Just to give me an understanding of how this all wraps around. I’m comfortable with the C# syntax, but very unsure of MVC3!

Answer 1

There are two ways you can handle this.

• Use a View Model.

In this scenario you have a class that contains your data model as well as other things required by the view, so something like this:

public class ViewModel
{
    public MyDomainModel Model { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> SelectListItems { get; set; }
}

• Use ViewBag.

In this case you add everything extra into the ViewBag dictionary. So in the controller, you’d have stuff like this:

ViewBag.SelectListItems = new SelectListItem[] { ... };

Then you can reference in the view itself

@Html.DropDownList("myselectlist", ViewBag.SelectListItems)