How to "DRY up" C# attributes in Models and ViewModels?
- by DanM
This question was inspired by my struggles with ASP.NET MVC, but I think it applies to other situations as well.
Let's say I have an ORM-generated Model and two ViewModels (one for a "details" view and one for an "edit" view):
Model
public class FooModel // ORM generated
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
public int CategoryId { get; set; }
}
Display ViewModel
public class FooDisplayViewModel // use for "details" view
{
[DisplayName("ID Number")]
public int Id { get; set; }
[DisplayName("First Name")]
public string FirstName { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Last Name")]
public string LastName { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Email Address")]
[DataType("EmailAddress")]
public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Category")]
public string CategoryName { get; set; }
}
Edit ViewModel
public class FooEditViewModel // use for "edit" view
{
[DisplayName("First Name")] // not DRY
public string FirstName { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Last Name")] // not DRY
public string LastName { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Email Address")] // not DRY
[DataType("EmailAddress")] // not DRY
public string EmailAddress { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
[DisplayName("Category")] // not DRY
public SelectList Categories { get; set; }
}
Note that the attributes on the ViewModels are not DRY--a lot of information is repeated. Now imagine this scenario multiplied by 10 or 100, and you can see that it can quickly become quite tedious and error prone to ensure consistency across ViewModels (and therefore across Views).
How can I "DRY up" this code?
Before you answer, "Just put all the attributes on FooModel," I've tried that, but it didn't work because I need to keep my ViewModels "flat". In other words, I can't just compose each ViewModel with a Model--I need my ViewModel to have only the properties (and attributes) that should be consumed by the View, and the View can't burrow into sub-properties to get at the values.
Update
LukLed's answer suggests using inheritance. This definitely reduces the amount of non-DRY code, but it doesn't eliminate it. Note that, in my example above, the DisplayName attribute for the Category property would need to be written twice because the data type of the property is different between the display and edit ViewModels. This isn't going to be a big deal on a small scale, but as the size and complexity of a project scales up (imagine a lot more properties, more attributes per property, more views per model), there is still the potentially for "repeating yourself" a fair amount. Perhaps I'm taking DRY too far here, but I'd still rather have all my "friendly names", data types, validation rules, etc. typed out only once.
