Let’s now look at a more complete scenario involving our model, where we use a controller class to implement the functionality necessary to publish a list of upcoming dinners, and enable users to add new ones:

We’ll implement this functionality by right-clicking on the “Controllers” folder and choose the “Add->Controller” menu command.  We’ll name our new controller “HomeController”.

We’ll then add three “action methods” within it that work with the NerdDinners model we created earlier using EF “Code-First”:

The “Index” action method above retrieves and renders a list of upcoming dinners. 

The “Create” action methods allow users to add new dinners.  The first “Create” method above handles the “HTTP GET” scenario when a user visits the /Home/Create URL, and send back a “New Dinner” form to fill out.  The second “Create” method handles the “HTTP POST” scenario associated with the form – and handles saving the dinner in the database.  If there are any validation issues it redisplays the form back to the user with appropriate error messages.

Adding Views for our Controllers

Our next step will be to add two “View templates” to our project – one for “Index” and one for “Create”. 

We’ll add the “Index” view to our project by moving our cursor within the Index action method of our controller, and then right-click and choose the “Add View” menu command.  This will bring up the “Add View” dialog.  We’ll specify that we want to create a strongly-typed view, and that we are passing in a IEnumerable list of “Dinner” model objects to it:

When we click “Add”, Visual Studio will create a /Views/Home/Index.aspx file.  Let’s then add the following code to it – which generates a <ul> list of Dinners, and renders a hyperlink that links to our create action:

We’ll then add the “Create” view to our project by moving our cursor within the Create action method of our controller, and then right-click and choose the “Add View” menu command.  Within the “Add View” dialog we’ll specify that we want to create a strongly-typed view, and that we are passing it a Dinner object.  We’ll also indicate that we want to “scaffold” using a “Create” template:

When we click “Add”, Visual Studio will create a /Views/Home/Create.aspx file with some scaffold-generated content within it that outputs an HTML <form> for a “Dinner” object.  We’ll tweak it slightly and remove the input element for the DinnerID property.  Our final view template content will look like this:

We have now implemented all of the code we need to write within our Controller and Views to implement the Dinner listing and Dinner creation functionality within our web application.