Model & Strongly Typed Views

A Model is simply a business entity in your application that may have some business rules defined. In layman's terms, a model is a class with fields, properties, and methods. Generally, a model only represents an Entity of your application, like Employee, Customer, etc, with properties or getters and setters.

The view that binds with any model is named a Strongly Typed View. We can bind any class as a model to look at and may access model properties from thereon. We can also use data associated with a model to render controls .

A strongly-typed view has the following advantages:

1. Intellisense
2. Compile time type checking
3. Automatic scaffolding

In the previous article, we used ViewBag, ViewData, and TempData to pass information from the controller to the view. Remember, all of these do boxing-unboxing and are error-prone due to no IntelliSense support, as they accept a key as a string. So, it is always recommended to pass a model object from the controller to the view and make your view strongly typed.

Let's understand this with an example:

• Step 1. Create a class in your model folder with some properties like below.

public class Employee
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
}

• Step 2. Create one Action Method to return the view, populate the Employee object, and pass it to the view like below.

public ActionResult Index()
{
Employee emp = new Employee();
emp.Id = 1;
emp.Name = "Michael";
emp.Age = 22;
return View(emp);
}

• Step 3. Use the Employee class as a model in your view to make your view strongly typed with the Employee object.

@using MVCExample.Models
@model Employee
@{
ViewBag.Title = "Index";
}
<h2> Index</h2>
@Model.Id
@Model.Name
@Model.Age

To access the properties of the Employee object, I have used the Model property of the WebViewPage class, which is the parent class for every view in MVC.

Let's take an example with a list of Employee objects:

public ActionResult Index()
{
List<employee> employeeList = new List<employee> ()
{
new Employee(){Id=1,Name="Ram",Age=24},
new Employee(){Id=2,Name="Shyam",Age=25},
new Employee(){Id=3,Name="Geetha",Age=26},
new Employee(){Id=4,Name="Raman",Age=27},
new Employee(){Id=5,Name="Newton",Age=70},
};
return View(employeeList);
}

@using MVCExample.Models
@model IEnumerable<Employee>
@{
ViewBag.Title = "Index";
}
<h2> Index</h2>
@foreach(var item in Model){
<ul>
<li>@item.Id</li>
<li>@item.Name</li>
<li>@item.Age</li>
</ul>
}

Since I have passed a list of Employee from the controller to view, I had to use an IEnumerable of Employee objects as a model so that I could iterate through the list.