Our ProductsController's "Create" Action method is responsible for handling the form posting of our "Add Product" scenario.   It currently handles incoming form parameters as arguments to the action method:

Figure 28

This approach works fine - although for forms involving large amounts of values the method signatures on Actions can start to become a little hard to read.  The code above that sets all of the incoming parameter values to the new Product object is also a little long and monotonous.

If you reference the MVCToolkit assembly, you can optionally take advantage of a useful Extension Method implemented within the System.Web.Mvc.BindingHelpers namespace that can help clean this up a little.  It is called "UpdateFrom" and can be used on any .NET object.  It takes a dictionary of values as an argument, and it will then automatically perform a property assignment on itself for any key that matches a public property on the object.

For example, we could re-write our Create action method above to use the UpdateFrom method like so:

Figure 29

Note: if you want to be more explicit for security reasons and only allow certain properties to be updated, you can also optionally pass a string array of the property names to update to the UpdateFrom method:

Figure 30