Question

I’m trying to create a simple eCommerce application. Products must have a brand and also at least one category. I’ve been using (quite heavily) the Sharp Lite examples MyStore and CaTs – so if you’re familiar with these you should hopefully understand the flow. I’m trying to create the Create action in the ProductController.

1) In the ProductController I inject both my product repository and my product service.

2) In the Create action I call productService.CreateProductViewModel()

3) in the CreateProductViewModel I create a new ProductFormDto which has all the properties my ViewModel needs (Name, Product Code, etc.) – and also the IEnumerables of both Category and Brands.

    public CreateProductViewModel()
    {
        ProductFormDto = new ProductFormDto();
    }

    public ProductFormDto ProductFormDto { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<ProductCategory> Categories { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<Brand> Brands { get; set; }

}

It’s going to be quite a complex View I think.

My question is, using Sharp Lite do I need to use automapper to map my ViewModel like so:

    public void Map()
    {
        Mapper.CreateMap<Product, ProductFormDto>();
    }

I placed this in the Tasks (services) layer as ServiceLayerMappings.cs

If so, where would I put the extra mapping code that I’ve seen, which in most examples is placed in the Controller?

How / where / when would I first call this ServiceLayerMappings?

Would the ServiceLayerMappings have all the maps to all of my ViewModels in a single file at the root of my Tasks layer?

Any sort of guidance would be greatly appreciated, as I’m scratching my head a little bit at this point!

Answer 1

Ah I think I have it. In the MyStore examples there are CudTasks files, and the following method is part of it:

    /// <summary>
    /// Udpates an entitry from the DB with new information from the form.  This example 
    /// manually copies the data but you could use a more sophisticated mechanism, like AutoMapper
    /// </summary>
    protected override void TransferFormValuesTo(ProductCategory toUpdate, ProductCategory fromForm) {
        toUpdate.Name = fromForm.Name;
        toUpdate.Parent = fromForm.Parent;
    }