The product entry screen we created in the previous section
works, but isn't very user friendly. Specifically, it requires that the
end user know the raw CategoryID and SupplierID numbers for the Product being
entered. We need to fix this by instead displaying an HTML dropdownlist
that displays the human readable names.
Our first step will be to modify our ProductsController to
pass to the View two collections - one containing a list of available
categories, the other a list of available suppliers. We'll do this by
creating a strongly typed ProductsNewViewData class that encapsulates these,
and which we'll then pass to the View (you can learn about this in Part 3):
Figure 19
We'll then update our "New" action method to
populate these collections and pass them as the ViewData for the
"New" view:
Figure 20
Within our view we can then use these collections
to generate HTML <select> dropdowns.
