Question

I’ve got a simple structure

Widget (parent table)

• id (IDENTITY)

• title

WidgetChild (child table) –

• id (foreign key to widget.id)
• content

On my View i have one field that captures the title, and another field that captures the content value.

 <%= Html.TextBox('title') %> 

and

 <%= Html.TextBox('content') %> 

How do i go about wiring up my controller to insert a new entry into Widget first and then insert an entry into WidgetChild? I’m not sure how to go about doing this.. do I pass a FormCollection instance, manually instantiate the Widget instance and pass in the values? Or can i use UpdateModel() somehow? I’m not familiar with how UpdateModel could bind my form values especially if they span multiple tables/classes.

Answer 1

You could use automatic model binding here.

With a form like this:

<%using(Html.BeginForm('Update', 'Home')) {%>     <%=Html.TextBox('widget.Title') %>     <%=Html.TextBox('childWidget.Content') %>     <input type='submit' value='Submit' />     <%} %> 

Your controller can then look like this:

public ActionResult Update(Widget widget, WidgetChild childWidget) {   // do whatever with the objects here } 

The objects will have the properties from the form populated there (Title for widget, and Content for childWidget) – then you can associate these objects with each other and save them to your linq to sql data context in the normal way.