Question

so my domain model has a property named Children which returns all menus with the ID of the current object. I want to create a view model and in controller map the values between them. So Children property is IEnumerable<MenuModel> and menu.Children is of type IEnumerable<MenuCache>. What would be the easiest way to do it? Do I need to spin through all children and add them manually to current model and just repeat that for all levels?

Model:

public class MenuModel
{
    public int ID { get; set; }

    public string URL { get; set; }

    public int ParentID { get; set; }

    public IEnumerable<MenuModel> Children { get; set; }
}

Controller:

using (var context = ww.WebObjs.WebDataContext.Get())
{
    var menu = context.MenuCaches.Where(x=> x.ID == 0).FirstOrDefault();
    model = new MenuModel()
    {
        ID = menu.ID,
        URL = menu.Text,
        ParentID = menu.ParentID,
        Children = menu.Children // how do I get those children?
   };
}

Answer 1

You could use LINQ:

using (var context = ww.WebObjs.WebDataContext.Get())
{
    var menu = context.MenuCaches.Where(x => x.ID == 0).FirstOrDefault();
    model = new MenuModel()
    {
        ID = menu.ID,
        URL = menu.Text,
        ParentID = menu.ParentID,
        Children = menu.Children.Select(x => new MenuModel
        {
            Prop1 = x.Prop1,
            Prop2 = x.Prop2,
            // and so on ...
        })
   };
}

or AutoMapper which I would strongly recommend. So after defining the corresponding mappings your controller action becomes far more readable:

using (var context = ww.WebObjs.WebDataContext.Get())
{
    var menu = context.MenuCaches.Where(x => x.ID == 0).FirstOrDefault();
    model = Mapper.Map<MenuCache, MenuModel>(menu);
}