Question

I’m just learning MVC and have a question that I’m sure is obvious to everyone but me ;-). I’m using MVC3 with EF4 and DbContext and have good success at understanding most of the basic functionality. Here’s my problem:

Lets say I have 2 tables (Company & User) and a 1-to-many relationship between them (foreign Key Company Id).

My question is this: What is the best way of enforcing the 1-to-many relationship in MVC? I don’t want anyone in any Company to edit any User. I want only the people in Company X to modify their own Users.

I’m trying to create a new User in a particular Company. I don’t want to use the standard EF template (which gives you a Company Drop Down List since its a foreign key) in the User View. I want to make sure that I’m in /Company/123456 before I can create a User from within that company.

I looked at the ASP.NET routing to see if something like this is possible:
/Company/123456/User/Create/ – it doesn’t look like it. (looks like I can only have one Controller/Action/Id). I’m just not sure how I ‘remember’ that we are currently in Company 123456 when creating new object.

Querystrings? (/User/Create/?Company=123456). Should I create another class (CompanyUser)? If so, I’m unsure how the routing would look (CompanyUser/Create/123456)?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

Mike

Answer 1

For /Company/123456/User/Create/ it should be configured as:

routes.MapRoute(
            "CreateCompanyUsers",                                                                    
            "/Company/{companyId}/User/Create",                           
            new { controller = "User", action = "Create" }
        );

In this case, /Company/123456/User/Create/ will go to an action that will look like

public class UserController : Controller {
   ...
   public ActionResult Create(int companyId){
       ...
   }
}