Microsoft 9GD00001 manual Displaying a Customer List, 269

Chapter 9: Creating Web Applications with ASP.NET MVC 269

This will create a new Controller with several methods for working with Customer data. Listing 9-1 already showed what a Controller looks like, and this is no different, except that it contains more action methods. The following sections explain how to perform various operations on customer data.

Displaying a Customer List

The first thing to do with customers is to display a list that will serve as a starting point for other operations. Listing 9-7 shows the Index action method of the CustomerController and how it gets a list of customers to display. The code uses the CustomerRepository, created in the preceding section. For C#, you need to add a using directive at the top of the file for the MyShopCS.Models namespace.

Listing 9-7 A Controller for displaying a list

C#:

public ActionResult Index()

{

var customers =

new CustomerRepository()

.GetCustomers();

return View(customers);

}

VB:

Function Index() As ActionResult

Dim custRep As New CustomerRepository

Dim customers As List(Of Customer)

customers = custRep.GetCustomers() Return View(customers)

End Function

Listing 9-7 shows how the Index method uses the CustomerRepository to get the list of customers. You need to pass that list to the View for display.

To create the View, right-click anywhere in the Index method and select Add View, which will display the Add View window, shown in Figure 9-5.

The name of the View is Index, corresponding to the name of the action method invoking the View. Naming the View after the action method is the default behavior, but