Step 1

Create a new ASP.NET MVC Project.  This will be our core project and we will be adding different modules to this as needed.  You will see a project structure like this in your solution explorer. Since i opted for the “Empty” project template, the controllers folder is empty.

Step 2

Now let’s create a controller and it’s views to this project. I will add a “Home” controller and it’s “index” action and it’s view. I added some text to the index.cshtml file and when i run the project, we can see the output like this.

Step 3

Our next step is to create a folder for our modules. All of our modules are going to be an area on top of our main(Core) projecct.  So we will create a folder called “Areas” in the Core Project. I have also deleted the “Models” folder and “App_data” folder because we are not using that now.

Now if you check the physical location of our Core project, you will see the Areas folder there. We will be using this as the location for our modules.

Step 4

Now we will add our first module. Right click on the solution explorer and select Add->New Project from the context menu. You will see the “Add New Project” dialog. Select “ASP.NET MVC4 Web application”. Specify the project name and select the project location same as the path to our Areas folder.

This will add the new project to our solution and it will be saved in the “Areas” folder of the main project. If you select the “Areas” folder in the main project and enable the “Show all files” option, you can see that our new project (Forum) is available under the Areas folder.

Step 6

Our next step is to change the assembly output path location of our module project. Select the Forum project, right click and select properties from the context menu. Go to Build tab. You will see a section called “Output“. There is a property called “Output path” Where you can define where the assemblies of this project should go when we build the project. By default the value will be bin\\ . Change the value to ..\\..\\bin\\ so that it will drop the compiled assemblies to the bin folder of our main project (Core).

Step 7

Now we will inherit the AreaRegistration class and override some items from that. So Let’s add the below class to our module project.

public class ForumAreaRegistration : AreaRegistration
{
    public override string AreaName
    {
        get { return "Forum";  }
    }
    public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
    {
        context.MapRoute(
            "forum_default",
            "Forum/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            namespaces: new string[] { "Forum.Controllers" }
        );
    }
}

I will add this class to the App_Start folder of the Forum Project. You can see that we overrode the AreaName property and RegisterArea method in this class. We have provided the area specific routing ( in this case Forum) in the RegisterArea method.

You need to update the RegisterRoutes method of Core project to include the namespace while defining routes. This  is to avoid the conflict between the controllers with same name which exists in both the projects.  So your route defenition (of core project) will looks like this

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.MapRoute(
        name: "Default",
        url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
        defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
        namespaces: new string[] { "Core.Controllers" }
    );
}

Now build your Forum project and then run the main project. You may access the pages from core project and the module and see what it brings.

Page of Core project

Page from module

The advantage of this pluggable architecture is, you can make some changes to one of your module and simply drop the assembly for that (and related view files if necessary) to the  bin folder of the main project.

The sample project i created for this blog post is available here for download. Enjoy. Do not forget to say “Hi” to me, if this post was useful to you.

The post Pluggable ASP.NET MVC application project structure appeared first on TechiesWeb.

There are a lot of people / organizatoins doing software development. Some people doing it in the right way and some does not. I am going to point out some symptoms of  bad ways of developing software here. These are my personal thoughts and it could be absolutely wrong in another persons view. I don’t care what those people think and will definitely try to avoid doing the following  bad practices.

Not Hiring a Designer for your UI/UX development.

If you are not ready to hire a UI developer and you want to build great software, you are thinking it wrong.

User interface obviously play a major role in keeping your end-user happy. It plays a significant role in your conversion rates as well. Nobody wants to use a screen which looks ugly or looks complex. Why did that happen ? because most of the time those were created by the normal developer!

If your company has a UX team, that is great. If not, you should hire someone temporarily who really does the UX job to get the base theme/layout of your app. This layout/theme should include sample pages( HTML & CSS version) for all possible scenarios the app could use. Once the UX designing is done and approved by the upper layer, that should stay as the foundation of all future developments which the programmer does. the dev team lead /manager should make sure that his/her team is strictly following the template defined by the UX team. If there is a requirement to create some page element which was not defined in the base template, the developer should not simply add it himself (unless he is an equally talented designer himself, which is not very common). The request for this new page element should be routed to the UX team and they should handle that.

Remember, if your application is not providing a consistent look and feel, believe me, it is the worst thing. Never do that if you are serious about what you are doing!

Not Providing the developer PC to your programmers

I hate working with slow computers as you do. I loose all my enthusiasm and excitement of writing code if my machine hangs when i build my project.  It is quite frustrating.

You should make sure that your programmers are happy about their computers. It need not be the super computer in the office. But a fairly faster one where they should not feel that it is slow when they run whatever necessary apps they use  for their daily job. If your project is taking more than 6 second to build/rebuild, it is time for an upgrade.  If you are not providing a faster computer to them, you are not only making them frustrated, but bringing additional delay in your project. Remember hardware is much cheaper these days compared to the developer billing.

Faster computers increases productivity. There is  no question about that. If you are an employee and your employer does not understand this, it is time to switch your job.

Reinventing the wheel

This is a debatable point. Should you develop your own libraries when there are similar libraries exist which does a decent job ?. I would not do this unless i am developing such a library to really compete with the existing providers in the market.  What is the purpose of developing another logging framework yourself when log4net and Nlog exists ? These efforts usually ends up in creating a library which may not be perfect as the existing one. One added advantage of the existing libraries are , they are well tested -used by the developer community. so it is reliable.

Reinventing the wheel usually happens with people who are not aware of what is happening in the industry. They are not aware that there is an existing library exist and lot of people in the community is trusting it.  You don’t see them in any community activities.  They are not continuous learners, which is bad for your team.

Creating a project plan which includes Weekends and Late nights

If you are creating a project plan thinking that the developer will work in the weekends and late nights for the delivery,  you are not fit for this job. You are not realizing that the productivity will decrease as the developer works additional time. Jimmy bogard has written a nice article about the 40 hour work culture. you should go and read it.

Remember, a good project manager should be able to mange his people too.

Thinking that the newly hired fresher will deliver same as the experienced senior developer

No!  Big No, is the answer. The newly hired employee can talk whatever he learned in the book and might have convinced you that he would fit for the (fresher) position during the hiring process.  But the knowledge, wisdom of what works better than other,  which the senior developer has acquired during his experience is totally different.  You can not replace that with a newly hired college graduate.

The bottom line is if you are hiring a fresher to replace a senior developer. You are doing it wrong!

There are a lot of other miserable things happening in the software development process. These are the few which i came to my mind because unfortunately i happened to experience few of these during my career. Feel free to share your thoughts on this.

The post How you should not run a software project appeared first on TechiesWeb.

By default, you will have a Views folder in root and you can have multiple folders under that with same name as of your controller name. Each of those folder will have views (.cshtml files) for your action methods. so the default structure will look like this for a controller called CustomerController with 3 action methods. index, edit and details.

View directory structure

Returning view from a different location

If you want to return a view from a different location, you can do it by specifying the full path to the view file when calling the View method. for example, if you want to return a view (index.cshtml) from a folder called Customer under UI folder which is in the root of the application,  you can do it like this

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return View("~/UI/Customer/Index.cshtml");
}

Assuming you have the _viewStart.html and web.config present in your UI folder.

The above method works. but it is not a good solution to hardcode the location like this. What if we have a lots of controllers and action methods ? , are we going to hard code it like this ? No !!!

What we can do is we can extend the razor view engine and tell it to look for views in our custom location.  so if you look at the sourcecode of RazorViewEngine, you can see that the default  location (what the convention follows) is there.

So let’s extend the RazorViewEngine and create our own view engine. Remember that we are going to simply change the View’s default location only. rest of the view functionality is going to be same (as of Razor). So we will create a class which extends from RazorViewEngine class and write code like this.

public class MyCustomViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{
    public MyCustomViewEngine()
    {
        string[] viewLocationFormatArr=new string[4];
        viewLocationFormatArr[0] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.cshtml";
        viewLocationFormatArr[1] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        viewLocationFormatArr[2] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        viewLocationFormatArr[3] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        this.ViewLocationFormats = viewLocationFormatArr;

        string[] masterLocationFormatArr = new string[4];
        masterLocationFormatArr[0] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.cshtml";
        masterLocationFormatArr[1] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        masterLocationFormatArr[2] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        masterLocationFormatArr[3] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        this.MasterLocationFormats = masterLocationFormatArr;

        string[] partialViewLocationFormatArr = new string[4];
        partialViewLocationFormatArr[0] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.cshtml";
        partialViewLocationFormatArr[1] = "~/UI/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        partialViewLocationFormatArr[2] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        partialViewLocationFormatArr[3] = "~/UI/Shared/{1}/{0}.vbhtml";
        this.ViewLocationFormats = partialViewLocationFormatArr;

    }
}

Here i updated only the View related things. I did not update the other 3 properties which handles the location for Areas. But it is going to be the same way. You can simply mention the new folder name and it will be fine.

RazorViewEngine class resides in System.Web.Mvc namespace which is in System.Web.Mvc dll

Now what we need to do is to register our new ViewEngine. So let’s go to the global.asax’s Application_Start event, clear existing view engines and register our new one.

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();
    var ourViewEngine = new MyCustomViewEngine();
    ViewEngines.Engines.Add(ourViewEngine);

    AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

    WebApiConfig.Register(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);
    FilterConfig.RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
    RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
    BundleConfig.RegisterBundles(BundleTable.Bundles);
}

That is all you need to make it happen. Hit F5 and you can see your app is now bringing views from the UI folder, instead of the Views folder.

You need to update the _viewStart.cshtml file to update the layout files location as well.

@{
    Layout = "~/UI/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";
}

Hope this helps. Here you can download a sample project which has the above approach implemented. Do not forget to say “Hi” to me, if this post was useful to you.

The post Rendering views from custom folders in ASP.NET MVC appeared first on TechiesWeb.

Let’s create a quiz page where we are going to show some questions with it’s answers to the user and user can select an answer from the available answer options, represented by radio buttons.

So first we will create some ViewModels for our view. ViewModel is nothing but a POCO class which we will use to transfer data between the action method and the view. So let’s create 3 classes like this.

public class Question
{
    public int ID { set; get; }
    public string QuestionText { set; get; }
    public List<Answer> Answers { set; get; }
    public string SelectedAnswer { set; get; }
    public Question()
    {
        Answers = new List<Answer>();
    }
}
public class Answer
{
    public int ID { set; get; }
    public string AnswerText { set; get; }
}
public class Evaluation
{
    public List<Question> Questions { set; get; }
    public Evaluation()
    {
        Questions = new List<Question>();
    }
}

 Now,  in our GET action method for the view, we will create an object of our ViewModel (Evaluation) class and set the Questions and it’s Answers properties and then send that to the view by passing it to the View method.

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var evalVM = new Evaluation();

    //the below is hardcoded for DEMO. you may get the data from some  
    //other place and set the questions and answers

    var q1 = new Question { ID = 1, QuestionText = "What is your favourite language" };
    q1.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 12, AnswerText = "PHP" });
    q1.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 13, AnswerText = "ASP.NET" });
    q1.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 14, AnswerText = "Java" });
    evalVM.Questions.Add(q1);

    var q2 = new Question { ID = 2, QuestionText = "What is your favourite DB" };
    q2.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 16, AnswerText = "SQL Server" });
    q2.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 17, AnswerText = "MyQL" });
    q2.Answers.Add(new Answer { ID = 18, AnswerText = "Oracle" });
    evalVM.Questions.Add(q2);

    return View(evalVM);           
}

Now our next step is to create the views to render the UI.  We are going to create an editor template to render the questions and it’s answers. So Let’s go to the Views folder and create a folder called EditorTemplates under the current controller folder (if you added the GET action method to Home controller, this will be ~/Views/Home)

After creating the folder, Add a new Editor template to that. Right click on the folder and select Add View option and give the name same as the type name (in this case Question).

Now add the below code to the newly created editor template (Question.cshtml)

@model ViewModels.Question
<div>
    @Html.HiddenFor(x=>x.ID)
    <h3> @Model.QuestionText </h3>
    @foreach (var a in Model.Answers)
    {
       <p>
          @Html.RadioButtonFor(b=>b.SelectedAnswer,a.ID)  @a.AnswerText 
       </p>
    }
</div>

What we are doing in the above code is, iterating through each Answers and showing a Radio button and the answer text. We are using the RadioButtonFor html helper method to render the radio button.

Now let’s  go to our main view (index.cshtml) and write some code. Our main view will be strongly typed to our Evaluation viewmodel and we will use the  EditorFor html helper method to bring our editor template to the main view(index.cshtml).

@model ViewModels.Evaluation
<h2>Quiz 24</h2>
@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
    @Html.EditorFor(x=>x.Questions)
    <input type="submit" />
}

now run the app (hit F5) and you will see the screen with the questions and answers. each answer will be accompanied by a radio button so that user can select one.

Getting the selected radio button values on form post

To get the selected radio button values on form submit, we can check the properties of the posted model. MVC Model binding can bind the posted form data to an instance of our ViewModel. So let’s add the below code to handle the POST action method.

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Index(Evaluation model)
{
    if (ModelState.IsValid)
    {
        foreach (var q in model.Questions)
        {
            var qId = q.ID;
            var selectedAnswer = q.SelectedAnswer;
            // Save the data 
        }
        return RedirectToAction("ThankYou"); //PRG Pattern
    }
    //to do : reload questions and answers
    return View(model);
}

Now if you run the program and use visual studio break points, you can see that the selected radio button values (AnswerID in our case) is available in the SelectedAnswer property of each question.

Hope this helps. You can download the sample source code here. Do not forget to say “Hi” to me,  if this post was useful to you.

The post Radio button list in ASP.NET MVC appeared first on TechiesWeb.

in Entity Framework 4.3.1,  ColumnAttribute is defined in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace which is available in EntityFramework.dll. So you need to add a reference to EntityFramework.dll and include a using statement in your class to use that.

using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;
namespace YourProject.Models
{
    public class User
    {
        public int CustomerID { set; get; }

        [Column(TypeName = "ntext")]
        public string AboutText { get; set; }
    }
}

But in EntityFramework 5, If you use the same code, you will get a compile time error like below

The type or namespace name 'ColumnAttribute' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

The reason for this error is, in  Entity Framework 5, they moved the ColumnAttribute class to a different namespace called System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema. So you need to add a using statement to include that namespace too in your model class.

using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;
using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema;
namespace YourProject.Models
{
    public class User
    {
        public int CustomerID { set; get; }

        [Column(TypeName = "ntext")]
        public string AboutText { get; set; }
    }
}

People usually get this error, when they follow a book which has sample code which uses Entity Framework 4.3.1 and they try to create the project and download Entity Framework via nuget where they will get the latest version, Entity framework 5 ( at the time of this post). Adding the relevant namespace will fix the issue.

More info in msdn,

ColumnAttribute class

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema Namespace

If interested, you can see the source code by checking the class in any assembly decompiling tools.

The post Column Attribute in Entity Framework 5 appeared first on TechiesWeb.

I was not doing any kind of wordpress stuff for the past 2-3 years, but  happened to attend the wonderful ann arbor give camp this year where our team did some wordpress customization(which includes a custom theme creation) for the non-profit organization we were working with. This made me think about creating a new theme and i jumped in!

This theme is developed on top of StudioPress theme from dailyblogtips.  My special thanks to them.

I named the theme as “TechiesWebMetro”.  Hope you like it.

I updated this blog to my new theme. So you must be feeling the new theme now

You can download the  theme here.

The post TechiesWebMetro wordpress theme appeared first on TechiesWeb.

MVC3 Tree View with jsTree

We will be creating an organizational tree which shows a hierarchical representation of who works for whom in an organization. We will have a table which stores the employee information along with who their manager is like below. I used SQL Server Compact Edition database in this project to store our data. To render the tree,  we are using jsTree plugin which converts our ul-li elements to a tree structure.

Each Employee record has a ManagerID which tells who is the manager of that employee. I set the First employee’s ManagerID value as NULL, because he is the President of the company and he do not have any manager.

Now, Let’s create a model to represent the employee. we will create a POCO Class like this.

Now we need a data access method to read data from our SQLServer compact database and return a list of  UserViewModel object. Since my demo program stores table in SQL Server compact edition database, i am using SqlCeConnection class and SqlCeCommand class to talk to it and get data.These two classes belongs to System.Data.SqlServerCe namespace. You need to add a using statement to import this namespace to your data access class.

So GetAllUsers method with give us a list of User class objects

Now we need to convert this list of objects (which is  a sequential list) to hierarchical form. that means, All the employees belongs to Joe, should be listed in his Employees property. So Let’s do some tricky code here to change the sequential list to hierarchical structure. So Let’s do that in our action method.

You can see that we are getting a list of Employee objects using our data access method and then getting the president of the company who does not have any manager so that we can show him as the first /top node of the organization tree.(Assuming that we will have only one president). We are getting the user object which has a null value for the ManagerID column as the president.

Setting the child objects.

After getting the president node, We are going to call SetChildren method which accepts an  Employee Model and the List of Total Users/Employees and then finding out the children / Employees reports to this employee. We are  doing recursion to set the children because we do not know how many layers of employees will be there in the hierarchy. Recursively calling the SetChildren function will set the child Employees for all the employees and at the end of that we will be getting a single Employee object with Children property properly filled.

And if you expand the Employees property further you can see the employees works under this employee.

Now let’s update our view to have the sufficient markup to render the tree. Since we are using  jsTree, We need to include jsTree library to the page. I included the default css file also. I updated the css file to show a user  icon instead of showing the default directory icon.

Our view is strongly typed to Employee class, which will be representing the president / top node of the hierarchy.  After printing the Name property value of the first node, We are calling a partial view called Children and passing our Model to that. So i created a partial view called Children.cshtml under the same view folder and have markup like this

You can see recursion here also. We are calling the Childrens partial view recursively to render the child’s for each node.

Now let’s see how  it works when you run the project.

You can customize the tree look and feel by changing the css  or playing with the options of  jsTree. You can download a working sample which i created to write this post here.

Hope this helps. Do not forget to leave a comment, if this post was useful to you.

 NSUGX3J7C2U3

The post ASP.NET MVC3 Tree View with jsTree appeared first on TechiesWeb.

MVC3 dynamically added form fields model binding

We are going to create a new page where it lists the various Programming Interests a user has.  The user will have an option to add a new Record ( Programming interest) to the list present.

Let’s create 2 ViewModels(ViewModel is a simple POCO class) for our views. Add the below 2 classes to our project.

public class User
{
    public int Id { set; get; }
    public string Name { get; set; }   
    public IList<UserInterest> Interests { get; set; }
}
public class UserInterest
{
    public int Id { set; get; }
    public string InterestText { set; get; }
    public bool IsExperienced { set; get; }
}

Now I am going to create a GET action which returns a User class object with his interests.

public ActionResult ClientSideCreation()
{
    var usr = new User();
    usr.Name = "Jon Skeet";
    usr.Interests = GetUserInterests();
    return View(usr);
}

This action is simply creating an object and setting the Name property and Setting the Interests collection. GetUserInterests is a method which returns a list of UserInterest object.

Now to handle the collection Property of our Model, Let’s create an Editor template called  UserInterest.cshtml under Home\EditorTempaltes.

Now we will use Html.EditorFor HTML Helper method to bring this editor template to our main view.

@model MvcApplication2.Models.User
@using(Html.BeginForm())
{ 
 <h3>Name : @Model.Name</h3>
 <h4>Interests</h4>   
 <div class="divIntersts">
    <table  id="container">
     <tr>
        <th>Name</th><th>Have Experience?</th>
     </tr>
     @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Interests)    
    </table>   
 </div>
 <p><input type="submit" value="Save" /></p>
}

We are done with that. Running the project will show the output like this.

note that this does not have any feature for the user to add the new record to the collection.

Adding Record Inline

I am going to make some changes to our view.

1) Add a button called ” Add new Item ” to our html markup.

<input type="button" id="btnAdd" value="Add New Item" />

2) Add some javascript code to create the form fields when user clicks on the Add New Item button and append that to our table which holds the collection.

    $(function () {
        $("#btnAdd").click(function (e) {
            var itemIndex = $("#container input.iHidden").length;
            e.preventDefault();
            var newItem = $("<tr><td><input id='Interests_" + itemIndex + "__Id' type='hidden' value='' class='iHidden'  name='Interests[" + itemIndex + "].Id' /><input type='text' id='Interests_" + itemIndex + "__InterestText' name='Interests[" + itemIndex + "].InterestText'/></td><td><input type='checkbox' value='true'  id='Interests_" + itemIndex + "__IsExperienced' name='Interests[" + itemIndex + "].IsExperienced' /></tr>");
            $("#container").append(newItem);
        });
    });

So the result of running our updated project will be like this. there is a “Add New Item” button and clicking that will add new record to our existing table.

Now When the user posts the form, the MVC Model binding feature will bind the newly added items as well. You can check that by putting a breakpoint in the HttpPost action method.

The trick is to keep the id property value of the html element in this format.

CollectionName_ItemIndex__PropertyName

and name property value in this format

CollectionName[ItemIndex].PropertyName

If your Collection item has many fields, It will be hard to write javascript code for creating the form elements. In that case, You may consider doing it in the server side.

So i will update my javascript code like this.

$(function () {
    $("#btnAdd").click(function (e) {
        var itemIndex = $("#container input.iHidden").length;       
        e.preventDefault();
        $.get("@Url.Action("NewInterestRow", "Home")/"+itemIndex,function(data){
            $("#container").append(data);
        });           
    });
});

You can see that we are not building the html in our client side code here. Instead we are mkaing an ajax call to the NewInterestRow action method and passing the Index of the new item. So we need to create that action method like this.

public ActionResult NewInterestRow(int id)
{
    var interest = new UserInterest { Id=id};
    return View("Partial/NewInterestRow",interest);
}

It simply creates an object of our UserInterest class and set the Id  property value of it as the values passed to this method (which is the Item Index of the new item to be created) .Then we are passing that object to a partial view called NewInterestRow. So Lets create a new View under Home/Partial called NewInterestRow.cshtml with the below content.

@model MvcApplication2.Models.UserInterest
@{    Layout = null; }
<tr> 
 <td>
  <input type="hidden" id="Interests_@(Model.Id)__Id" class="iHidden"  name='Interests[@Model.Id].Id' />
  <input type='text' id='Interests_@(Model.Id)__InterestText'   name='Interests[@Model.Id].InterestText'/>
 </td>
 <td>
    <input type='checkbox' value='true'  id='Interests_@(Model.Id)__IsExperienced' name='Interests[@Model.Id].IsExperienced' />
 </td>
</tr>

This View also creates the same HTML elements we created at client side previously, with the same name /ID convention we need for the Model binding to work.

Summary : Here we showed 2 ways to add dynamic form fields to an existing collection which gives a nice user experience and how MVC Model binding works for those new elements. The main thing to remember is to keep the format of the name and id property values. Model binding will work for the new elements only if they follow the format.

You can download the sample source code here to see how it works.

The post ASP.NET MVC3 Dynamically added form fields model binding appeared first on TechiesWeb.

You can check the ViewData.ModelState.Values collection and see what are the Errors. Here is the sample code

[Httpost]
public ActionResult Create(User model)
{
   if(ModelState.IsValid)
   {
     //Save and redirect
   }
   else
   {
     foreach (var modelStateVal in ViewData.ModelState.Values)
     {
       foreach (var error in modelStateVal.Errors)
       {               
          var errorMessage = error.ErrorMessage;
          var exception = error.Exception;
          // You may log the errors if you want
       }
     }
   }         
   return View(model);
 }
}

The post ASP.NET MVC How to get Model Error details in Controller Action Method When ModelValidation fails appeared first on TechiesWeb.

The normal -straight forward way is to Loop through  each DataRow, Create a new instance of Custom class object, read the column values of the current row(iterator) in the loop and Set the Proerties of the object..

The below code shows looping the DataRows and Creating an object of our Custom Customer Class and Setting the Properties and Adding to the Collection of Customer objects.

We can avoid this handwritten ForEach loop by using some LINQ syntax.  Generally LINQ queries works on data sources which implement the IEnumerable<T>/ IQueryable<T> Interface. But DataTable does not implement any of these. So we can not directly apply LINQ queries on a DataTable.

But DataTable class has an extension method called AsEnumerable which returns an IEnumerable collection of DataRow. So we can apply the AsEnumerable function on a DataTable and then play with some LINQ on the resulting collection.

So we can replace our previous version of code with the below one which make use of LINQ

For more information visit the msdn page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.datatableextensions.asenumerable(v=vs.100).aspx.

Hope this helps you some day

The post How to Convert DataTable to Collection of Custom Class object appeared first on TechiesWeb.