Question

This MVC tutorial suggests to make dropdownlists like so:

//
// POST: /StoreManager/Create
[HttpPost]
 public ActionResult Create(Album album)
 {
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
        db.Albums.Add(album);
        db.SaveChanges();
        return RedirectToAction("Index");  
    }
    ViewBag.GenreId = new SelectList(db.Genres, "GenreId",
"Name", album.GenreId);
    ViewBag.ArtistId = new SelectList(db.Artists, "ArtistId",
"Name", album.ArtistId);
    return View(album);
 }

I’m new to MVC, but it seems to me this isn’t a good separation of concerns because it makes database calls within the controller. Is this correct?

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

This is up to you to decide on the complexity of your project. The larger the project gets – the least likely you should be to take this approach. I would recommend at the very minimum using the Repository pattern to return your data. Secondly as per the example above it uses ViewBag – this is also something not highly recommended. Sure its ‘cool’ its there – but generally this data you want in a strongly typed View Model that represents the data going to the View, not the dynamic magic of ViewBag that relies on you not mistyping a field name to use correctly.