ASP.NET 4 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 22B. Editor Templates in MVC

Editor templates are structured helpers that enable you to build a user interface based on your data model. In this lesson I show you how to use the editor templates to edit the data in your model.

Here are the three helper methods in the EditorExtensions class:

• Editor() — This helper returns the HTML input markup for a particular property in the model where the property is identified via a string expression.

• EditorFor() — This helper also returns the HTML input markup for a particular property in the model. However, with this helper, the property is identified via a strongly-typed expression.

• EditorModelFor() — This helper returns the HTML input markup for all of the simple properties in the model.

  Note

  The expression EditorFor(model => model) is equivalent to EditorForModel().

THE EDITORFORMODEL HELPER

Figure 22B-1 shows the Entity Data Model (EDM) that I use in this lesson.

Figure 22B.1. FIGURE 22B-1

These are the Create action methods:

//
// GET: /Task/Create

public ActionResult Create()
{
    Models.Task task = new Models.Task();
    return View(task);
}
//
// POST: /Task/Create

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(Models.Task task)
{
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
        try
        {
            // TODO: Add insert logic here
            return RedirectToAction("Index");
         }
            catch
         {
            return View(task);
         }
    }
    return View(task);
}

This is the View that uses the EditorForModel helper:

<%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" ...