ASP.NET MVC Editing A Collection Best Practices - Your Opinion

Question

Given the following class, what is your opinion on the best way to handle create/edit where Attributes.Count can be any number.

public class Product {
  public int Id {get;set;}
  public string Name {get;set;}
  public IList<Attribute> Attributes {get;set;}
}

public class Attribute {
  public string Name {get;set;}
  public string Value {get;set;}
}

The user should be able to edit both the Product details (Name) and Attribute details (Name/Value) in the same view, including adding and deleting new attributes.

Handling changes in the model is easy, what's the best way to handle the UI and ActionMethod side of things?

Answer 1

Look at Steve Sanderson’s blog post Editing a variable length list, ASP.NET MVC 2-style.

Controller

Your action method receives your native domain model Product and stays pretty simple:

public ActionResult Edit(Product model)

View

Edit.aspx

<!-- Your Product inputs -->
<!-- ... -->

<!-- Attributes collection edit -->
<% foreach (Attribute attr in Model.Attributes)
   {
       Html.RenderPartial("AttributeEditRow", attr);
   } %>

AttributeEditRow.ascx

Pay your attention to helper extension Html.BeginCollectionItem(string)

<% using(Html.BeginCollectionItem("Attributes")) { %>
    <!-- Your Attribute inputs -->
<% } %>

Adding and editing of new attributes is possible too. See the post.

Answer 2

Use the FormCollection and iterate through the key/value pairs. Presumably you can use a naming scheme that will allow you to determine which key/value pairs belong to your attribute set.

[AcceptVerbs( HttpVerb.POST )]
public ActionResult Whatever( FormCollection form )
{
 ....
}