Question

Many tutorials say that when i have to pass data from controller to view the best way is to create a flattern viewMoldel.
This solution came to solve also other problems (like the eager loading problem).
My concern is that when i create a flatten viewModel I lose all the informations that I store in the entities via annotation.

Suppose that i have a model composed by

class product{
  [DisplayName("Name")] 
  public String Name{get;set;}

  [DisplayName("Image")] 
  public String Image{get;set;}

  [DisplayName("Description")] 
  public String Description{get;set;}

  public String CategoryId{get;set;}
}

class category{
  [DisplayName("Code")] 
  Public String Id{get;set;}

  [DisplayName("Category name")] 
  public String Name{get;set;}

}

To render a grid that show product informations many tutorials say that the best way is to provide a flatten viewModel like this:

class productGridViewModel{
  Public String ProductName{get;set}
  Public String ProductImage{get;set}
  Public String ProductDescription{get;set}
  Public String CategoryName{get;set}
}

My concern is that I need to write again all the DisplayName annotations in the viewModel.

Answer 1

If you are flattening your model entities into ViewModels, shouldn’t the attributes be removed from the model entity classes and placed on the ViewModels? Your model entities will not be used for display, so they should not have those attributes.