ASP.NET MVC/LINQ: What's the proper way to iterate through a Linq.EntitySet in a View?

Posted by Terminal Frost on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Terminal Frost
Published on 2010-04-25T23:40:58Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 23:43 UTC
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OK so I have a strongly-typed Customer "Details" view that takes a Customer object Model.

I am using LINQ to SQL and every Customer can have multiple (parking) Spaces.

This is a FK relationship in the database so my LINQ-generated Customer model has a "Spaces" collection. Great!

Here is a code snippet from my CustomerRepository where I iterate through the Customer's parking spaces to delete all payments, spaces and then finally the customer:

public void Delete(Customer customer)
{
    foreach (Space s in customer.Spaces)
        db.Payments.DeleteAllOnSubmit(s.Payments);
    db.Spaces.DeleteAllOnSubmit(customer.Spaces);
    db.Customers.DeleteOnSubmit(customer);
}

Everything works as expected!

Now in my "Details" view I want to populate a table with the Customer's Spaces:

<% foreach (var s in Model.Spaces)
   { %>
    <tr>
        <td><%: s.ID %></td>
        <td><%: s.InstallDate %></td>
        <td><%: s.SpaceType %></td>
        <td><%: s.Meter %></td>
    </tr>
<% } %>

I get the following error:

foreach statement cannot operate on variables of type 'System.Data.Linq.EntitySet' because 'System.Data.Linq.EntitySet' does not contain a public definition for 'GetEnumerator'

Finally, if I add this bit of code to my Customer partial class and use the foreach in the view to iterate through ParkingSpaces everything works as expected:

public IEnumerable<Space> ParkingSpaces
{
    get
    {
        return Spaces.AsEnumerable();
    }
}

The problem here is that I don't want to repeat myself. I was also thinking that I could use a ViewModel to pass a Spaces collection to the View, however LINQ already infers and creates the Spaces property on the Customer model so I think it would be cleanest to just use that.

I am missing something simple or am I approaching this incorrectly?

Thanks!

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