Question

With NHibernate I no longer expose foreign keys on my domain objects, so Product no longer has a property:

public int CategoryId {get;set;}

but instead has:

public Category Category {get;set;}

Unforunately this doesn’t appear to work so well with the automatic model binding in ASP.NET MVC – if I want to simply bind a form collection directly to my domain object.

For example, I couldn’t just have a selectlist of Category Id values in my view, accept a product object in my controller action, and expect MVC to convert this into a category object.

My solution so far has been to create view models that do have properties for the foreign key values – However, this normally leads to a fair bit of duplication in code and extra mapping logic in my controller.

Is there a better way?

Answer 1

Using pared-down view models tailored specifically for your views is the recommended approach; you can simplify the mapping operations required by using AutoMapper.