I have a BookCreateModel which consists of book's plane info such as Title, PublishYear & etc plus a collection of book Authors (complex type) :
public class BookCreateModel
{
public string Title { get; set; }
public int Year { get; set; }
public IList<AuthorEntryModel> Authors { get; set; }
}
public class AuthorEntryModel
{
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
}
in CreateBook view I have used EditorFor
helper :
@Html.EditorFor(m => m.Authors, "AuthorSelector")
and AuthorSelector template is as below:
<div class="ptr_authors_wrapper">
@for (int i = 0; i < Model.Count; i++)
{
<div class="ptr_author_line" data-line-index="@i">
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o[i].FirstName)
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o[i].LastName)
</div>
}
</div>
<script>
...
</script>
the AuthorSelector
template contains some wrapper markups which need to be aware of each rendered item's index plus some javascript which handle the child input's interactions and need to be rendered once (inside the AuthorSelector
template), thus getting rid of the for loop/or the AuthorSelector template is not possible.
now the problem is EditorFor act a little strange and generate input names like this :
<input id="Authors__0__FirstName" name="Authors.[0].FirstName" type="text" value="" />
<input id="Authors__0__LastName" name="Authors.[0].LastName" type="text" value="" />
as you can see instead of generating names like Authors[0].FirstName
it adds an extra dot which makes the default model binder unable to parse posted data.
any idea ?
Thanks !
I would recommend you sticking to conventions, i.e. replace:
@Html.EditorFor(m => m.Authors, "AuthorSelector")
with:
@Html.EditorFor(m => m.Authors)
and then rename your ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/AuthorSelector.cshtml
to ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/AuthorEntryModel.cshtml
and make it strongly typed to a single AuthorEntryModel
model and get rid of the loop:
@model AuthorEntryModel
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o.FirstName)
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o.LastName)
ASP.NET MVC will automatically render the editor template for all elements of the collection and generate proper names.
UPDATE:
After seeing your update here's my response:
In your main view:
<div class="ptr_authors_wrapper">
@Html.EditorFor(m => m.Authors)
</div>
In your editor template:
@model AuthorEntryModel
<div class="ptr_author_line">
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o.FirstName)
@Html.TextBoxFor(o => o.LastName)
</div>
You will notice the absence of script in the template which is perfectly normal. Scripts have nothing to do in markup. They go into separate javascript files. In this file you could use jQuery to do whatever you need to do with your markup. It gives you methods such as .index()
that allow you to get the index of the element in the matched selector so that you don't need to write any loops and pollute your markup with things like data-line-index
attributes.