Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

Scaffolding a Store Manager

Your next decision might be to create a store manager. A store manager is a controller enabling you to edit album information. To get started you can right-click the Controllers folder in your new solution and select Add Controller. In the dialog that appears (shown in Figure 4.3), you can set the controller name and select scaffolding options. The scaffolding template selected in the screenshot requires a model class and a data context.

Figure 4.3

What Is Scaffolding?

Scaffolding in ASP.NET MVC can generate the boilerplate code you need for create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functionality in an application. The scaffolding templates can examine the type definition for a model (such as the Album class you've created), and then generate a controller and the controller's associated views. The scaffolding knows how to name controllers, how to name views, what code needs to go in each component, and also knows where to place all these pieces in the project for the application to work.

Scaffolding Options

Like nearly everything else in the MVC framework, if you don't like the default scaffolding behavior, you can customize or replace the code generation strategy to fulfill your own desires. You can also find alternative scaffolding templates through NuGet (just search for scaffolding). The NuGet repository is filling up with scaffolding to generate ...