Lesson Sunday

In this lesson, we'll add more CRUD functionality to our To Do List using our new EF Core-powered ORM capabilities. Specifically, we'll focus on the create action here.

Create

Creating a new item is a two-step process:

  1. We need a form to supply information about the new item.
  2. We also need functionality to submit that form and save the information it contains to our database.

This means we'll also need two Create actions:

  1. A GET action to display our form to users.
  2. A POST action to manage form submission.

Controller

Let's add these actions to our ItemsController now:

ItemsController.cs
...
public ActionResult Create()
{
    return View();
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(Item item)
{
    _db.Items.Add(item);
    _db.SaveChanges();
    return RedirectToAction("Index");
}
...

  1. The Create() GET route is used exactly the same way as New() was before we started using Entity. You may notice that this strays from our RESTful routing practices — previously, we learned that New() should be used for this GET request. We are now straying from our RESTful routing practices in order to make use of new tools that streamline our forms: HTML helper methods. We will go into depth about HTML helper methods in the next lesson.

  2. The second action is our POST request. This route will take an item as an argument, add it to the Items DbSet, and then save the changes to our database object. Afterwards, it will redirect users to the Index view.

Add() is a DbSet method we run on our DBSet property of our ToDoListContext, while SaveChanges() is a DbContext method that we run on the ToDoListContext itself (which extends the DbContext class).

Together, they update the DBSet and then sync those changes to the database which the ToDoListContext represents. Once again, EF Core takes care of the work for us.

In the next lesson, we'll learn about HTML helper methods, which will make it much easier to create forms and simplify our HTML.

Controllers/ItemsController.cs

using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc;
using ToDoList.Models;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

namespace ToDoList.Controllers
{
  public class ItemsController : Controller
  {
    private readonly ToDoListContext _db;

    public ItemsController(ToDoListContext db)
    {
      _db = db;
    }

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
      List<Item> model = _db.Items.ToList();
      return View(model);
    }

    public ActionResult Create()
    {
      return View();
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Create(Item item)
    {
      _db.Items.Add(item);
      _db.SaveChanges();
      return RedirectToAction("Index");
    }
  }
}
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Lesson 24 of 36
Last updated February 16, 2023