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