.Apple Technologies: Modifying our first MVC 4 Web Application

Apart from the generated code I’m just going to add some more pieces to this MVC Web Application. I will be publishing a full fledge ePhoneBook on ASP.NET MVC 4 later. This sample code will help you to get more understanding on MVC 4.

The first thing I’m going to do is adding a PhoneBook Model class .

I have changed the PhoneBookModel code as below,

In this class I have mentioned the validation attribute for the elements. The ValidationAttributes are comes fromSystem.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. There are multiple validation attributes available and all are self-descriptive.

The above image shows the available validation attributes. Read More on Validation Attribute from MSDN.

Now let’s add required views (Create, Edit, Delete, Details, List), to add the views just right click on the View folder and click on Add --> Views menu.

Now I’m going to add the Listing view, I have given the View Name as “Index” and selected the 'create a strongly typed view' Model from the Drop-down so that the code will be generated accordingly to the Model. If the created PhoneBookModel is not showing in the dropdown then build the application and then check.

Now we can specify which scaffolding template to use so that the code will be generated as per the template , I have selected “List” template like below

When you click on ‘OK’ button the Index.cshtml is ready.

The same way I have added all files for this sample project

The details page looks like

If you look at the code from Create template all validations are in place

Now we need to add Controller actions for these scaffolding items.

Click on the Add --->Controller menu, once you have clicked on that menu then a popup will be shown like below ,

There are multiple controller templates available in this dialogue box

Empty MVC controller

MVC controller with read/write actions and views, using Entity Framework

MVC controller with empty read/write actions

Empty API controller

API controller with read/write actions and views, using Entity Framework

API controller with empty read/write actions

I choosed “MVC controller with empty read/write actions” controller template Now give the controller name as PhoneBookController. Note that MVC requires the name of all controllers to end with "Controller".

Click on “Add” button to add the controller to our application, now the controller file is created as per our template selection and added to our project, click here to see the generated file

Now I’m going to modify the newly added controller file, the first thing I have added a property that will have a default values for the ePhoneBook

After that I have modified the Created method same as below,

If you see this method the return type is ActionResult, What’’s ActionResult. An action result represents a command that the framework will perform on behalf of the action method. The ActionResult class is the base class for action results. It Encapsulates the result of an action method and is used to perform a framework-level operation on behalf of the action method.