Cymen Vig

One thing that I’m not particularly fond of in ASP.NET MVC is figuring out where to put additional data one needs for views. If one is using a “model per view” approach it is simple – stick it in that model. Otherwise you can choose to add it to a model that won’t always need it or pass it via ViewBag/ViewState. I currently lean towards the last option.

The other annoyance is how best to transform a list of objects into a IEnumerable<SelectListItem> collection cleanly with the special case of handling a default value. I have started to approach this with extension methods and am very happy with how it is working.

Transforming your List<MyObject> to IEnumerable<SelectListItem>

Our current data tier has a manager class for each object type. When that object type is going to be used in a select list, I add an extension to IEnumerable<MyObject> like so:

To support the option of a default value, I have an extension method that applies to IEnumerable:

Here is an example of an actually call to this methods in: