Patterns for ASP.NET MVC views for Add/Edit records

Question

I'd like to exchange/share some design patterns that a programmer can apply when designing screen views which formerly enable adding and editing records to a DB for entities which have a foreign key.

From my experience I have often applied a couple of methods:

• The user add the child record by selecting Add Child from the Parent View
• The user add the child record by selecting the parent relation directly in the create/edit page

In the first case the pattern is really easy. Suppose you have Customer and Store entities where a customer can have many stores. The programmer could then add a button "Add Store" in the customer detail page which will invoke a GET action on the server that returns a default populated Store with a Customer already set. For example:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult CreateStore( int customerID ) {
    return View( new StoreViewModel() { CustomerID = customerID } );
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult SaveStore( StoreViewModel store ) {
    [...save store here...]
}

Although this is very easy to implement, it requires the programmer to code many action method and views which can be engineered a little bit better than this example.

I would like to know if there is any other pattern that you use in your experience. Also if there is any link/book to read to further explore this topic.

Answer 1

I'd really recommend to take a look at REST pattern and to RestfulRouting library.

Think about Store and Customer as resources. You'll finally have two sets of methods for each resource.

You can utilize RespondTo method to return response depending on content type. So you can reply with json in case of ajax request and with html in case of standard query.

So when you create multiple stores for customer (from the customer page), you can just use ajax. When you create stores from the standard way (from store page), you'll use the same methods.

It's very useful and wide spread. It's used by default in Rails.