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Vici MVC Quick Walkthrough - Part 5 - Form Handling

Handling forms is one of the most important features of any web application framework. Vici MVC handles this quite a bit differently than most other frameworks, but we believe it is very elegant and powerful.

We'll show the basic by presenting a small example of a form to edit an employee record:

[Layout("master")]
[View("editemployee")]
public class EditEmployee : PageController
{
   public class Employee
   {
       public string Name;
       public decimal Salary;
   }
 
   public class EmployeeForm : WebForm
   {
       private Employee _employee;
 
       [FormTextBox(MinLength=3,MaxLength=30)]
       public string Name;
 
       [FormTextBox(Min=0)]
       public decimal Salary;
 
       public EmployeeForm(Employee employee)
       {
            _employee = employee;
       }
 
       // Called when first showing the form
       public override void OnFill()
       {
           Name = _employee.Name;
           Salary = _employee.Salary;
       }
 
       // Called when the form was posted and all fields are valid
       public override void OnPost()
       {
           _employee.Name = Name;
           _employee.Salary = Salary;
       }
   }
 
   public void Run(int id)
   {
        Employee employee = new Employee(id);
 
        EmployeeForm form = new EmployeeForm(employee);
 
        form.Bind();
 
        if (form.Validated)
        {
            employee.Save();
        }
   }
}

editemployee.htm

<html>
<body>
<form method="post" action="{{@Url}}">
<label>Name</label> [[Name]]
<label>Salary></label> [[Salary]]
<input type="submit" name="btnSave" value="Save" />
</form>
</body>
</html>

The [[Name]] and [[Salary]] tags are replaced by text boxes. When posting the form, the input is validated according to the attributes in the form class. If there is a validation error, the values entered in the text boxes will be remembered across postbacks.

Of course you can do more than display text boxes. Other stuff you can do:

  • Use dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes or any other control
  • Create your own controls and attributes
  • Use custom validation methods
  • Assign CSS classes
  • ...

>> Next: Part 6