asp.net mvc how can I pass the collection to the controller

Question

The question rather interesting: How can I pass collection to the controller when i have strondly-typed view for create template. This is my ViewModel:

 public class AgencyOfficiesItem
    {    
        public string Address { get; set; }
        public List<PhoneItem> Phones { get; set; }
        public List<SelectListItem> CitiesList { get; set; }
    }

 public class PhoneItem {
        public string Phone { get; set; }
        public string PhoneOperator { get; set; } 
    }

So, I want to create a view for creating the phone object, which has the phone operator and phone number fields. But, the interesting thing is that i want to have a collection from phone objects and pass them to the controller. Any ideas?

Have you looked at this: Model Binding To A List

Roman
– Roman

2011-04-25 22:33:41 +00:00
Commented Apr 25, 2011 at 22:33 — Roman
– Roman, Commented Apr 25, 2011 at 22:33

user553671 · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-26 03:18:46Z

2

If you just go ahead and do something like this in your view:

@using(Html.BeginForm... // I'm doing this from memory, check the arguments
{
    for( int idx = 0; idx < Model.Phones.Count; idx++ )
    {
        @Html.EditorFor(m => m.Model.Phones[idx].Phone)
        @Html.EditorFor(m => m.Model.Phones[idx].PhoneOperator)
    }
    // similar for cities, other model properties, etc.
}

and declare your post method as follows

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult OnPostBack( <modeltype> arg )
{
    if( ModelState.IsValid )
    {
        // action logic, etc.

then all should be well. MVC will define the resulting textboxes in a way that it will be able to link them back up with the model on postback. I believe what it does is declare the name attribute on the textbox to be, for example, Phones_1_Phone. You can check by looking at the generated HTML in your browser.

BTW, there are other ways of getting this to work, too. You can use keys, with a Dictionary<> rather than a List<>, and sparse arrays, too, I believe. And of course you'll want to do something more than just generate a bunch of textboxes on your page -- some labels would be nice :).

I found that a great tutorial on this and much more is Steven Sanderson's Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework, from Apress. I started off knowing nothing about MVC just a couple of months ago, and now I'm quite comfortable with it (although not yet an expert).

Oops, forgot to mention something important: my example uses MVC3 and its Razor view engine. You'll need to translate it into MVC2 syntax if you're not using MVC3. But you should give MVC3 a look, I find it more intuitive than its predecessors. Not to mention less "wordy".

answered Apr 26, 2011 at 3:18

user553671

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1 Comment

Alex Over a year ago

Thanks, but i know about this approach. The problem is that my page isn't for editing, it's for creating. And i don't know exaclty how many textboxes there will be. For instance, I have one field for phone, and if user wants to add one more, he clicks to the button "Add" and one more filed appears.

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