Question

Most tutorials don’t really cover this at all. They just say link your entity to a controller and you’re done.

In my business model I have Customers and I have Customer Contacts 1 Customer to >1 Customer Contacts. How do I create a view model for these that will allow them to be edited/created/whatever from the same view?

public class Customer
{
    public Customer()
    {
        this.CustomerContacts = new List<CustomerContact>();
        this.Systems = new List<System>();
        this.CreatedByCustomerTickets = new List<Ticket>();
        this.CustomerTickets = new List<Ticket>();
    }

    public long CustomerID { get; set; }
    public Nullable<bool> BusinessCustomer { get; set; }
    public string CustomerName { get; set; }
    public string CustomerNotes { get; set; }
    public virtual ICollection<CustomerContact> CustomerContacts { get; set; }
    public virtual ICollection<System> Systems { get; set; }
    public virtual ICollection<Ticket> CreatedByCustomerTickets { get; set; }
    public virtual ICollection<Ticket> CustomerTickets { get; set; }
}

public class CustomerContact
{
    public long CustomerContactID { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public int Phone { get; set; }
    public string AddressLine1 { get; set; }
    public string AddressLine2 { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string State { get; set; }
    public Nullable<int> Zip { get; set; }
    public Nullable<long> CustomerID { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public bool PromotionalEmails { get; set; }
    public virtual Customer Customer { get; set; }
}

Answer 1

Well I’d start with this

public class CustomerViewModel
{
  public Customer Customer {get; set;}
  public CustomerContact CustomerContact {get; set;}
}

and work from there.

If you don’t need all the properties from the domain objects, you may consider something more like:

public class CustomerViewModel
    {
       public long CustomerID { get; set; }
       public ICollection<CustomerContact> CustomerContacts { get; set; }
    }

It’s really up to you to construct your view models in a way that will meet the needs of your specific project.