Map IEnumerable model to view

Question

Keeping this basic I have two models. customer and CustomerViewModel. I want to map the properties between one to another.

public class Customer
{
    public string CompanyName { get; set; }
    public int CustomerType { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<ContactViewModel> CustomerContacts { get; set; }
}

public class CustomerViewModel
{
    public string CompanyName { get; set; }
    public int CustomerType { get; set; }
    public ContactName {get;set;}
    public ContactTel {get;set;}
}

The problem is I want to map customerContact to contactName and contactTel. I understand it is an IEnumerable and contains a list of contacts but during this filter IEnumerable of contact view model will only contain 1 record.

How would I do this type of mapping in automapper?

UPDATE:

I decided to go with a similar approuch someone mentioned earlier. I was hoping I can do this in automapper but I guess it is slightly more complex.

public static CustomerListViewModel MapToListView(this CustomerServiceModel svcModel)
    {
        ContactServiceModel contact = new ContactServiceModel { Name = String.Empty, Telephone = String.Empty }; 
        if(svcModel.CustomerContacts != null) contact = svcModel.CustomerContacts.FirstOrDefault();

        return new CustomerListViewModel
        {
            Id = svcModel.Id,
            address = svcModel.Address.MapToView(),
            CompanyName = svcModel.CompanyName,
            ContactName = contact.Name,
            ContactTelephone = contact.Telephone
        };
    }

Answer 1

I am not sure this can be done with AutoMapper. You can try to define an extension method, such as this:

public static CustomerViewModel ToViewModel(this Customer cust)
        {
            return new CustomerViewModel()
                {
                    CompanyName = cust.CompanyName,
                    CustomerType = cust.CustomerType,
                    ContactName = cust.CustomerContacts.First().ContactName,
                    ContactTel = cust.CustomerContacts.First().ContactTel
                };
        }

Of course, a little validation on top would be nice. Then you use it like this:

Customer cust= GetCustomer();
CustomerViewModel model= cust.ToViewModel();

Answer 2

Try to use linq

public ActionResult Index()
{
   var viewmodel = CustomerViewModel();

   return View(viewmodel);
}

private static CustomerViewModel ()
{
    return new CustomerViewModel
    {
    ...
    ContactName = BusinessLogic.GetContactName("Microsoft");
    ContactTel = BusinessLogic.GetContactTel();
    }
}

Where BusinessLogic is your "brain"-class which decides what to get from data, and there use linq to get telephone and name:

public static class BusinessLogic
{
    public static string GetContactName(string companyName)
    {
        var c = new Customer () ... // get you Customer-object

        var q = (from contacts in c.CustomerContacts
                where contacts.CompanyName == companyName
                select contacts.ContactName).First();

        return q;
    }
}

But you have one mistake as I can see. You confuse view model-data (which you want to show for user on web-page) and model of data (which present object-model "Contacts"). In other words.. better to use special model class as Type for your CustomerContacts. Sorry for my "good" english. Hope I've helped you.

Answer 3

This will throw an exception if CustomerContacts is null or empty (I'll try to come up with a more robust solution), but here's something that would work for the happy path:

Mapper.CreateMap<Customer, CustomerViewModel>()
    .ForMember(dest => dest.ContactName, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.CustomerContacts.First().ContactName))
    .ForMember(dest => dest.ContactTel, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.CustomerContacts.First().ContactTel));

Perhaps a safer option would be to put the logic inside of the Customer class itself:

public class Customer
{
    /* other members */
    public string ContactName 
    { 
        get 
        {
            string name = null;
            if (CustomerContacts != null && CustomerContacts.Any()) 
            {
                name = CustomerContacts.First().ContactName;
            }

            return name;
        }
    }

    public string ContactTel
    {
        get 
        {
            string tel = null;


            if (CustomerContacts != null && CustomerContacts.Any()) 
            {
                tel = CustomerContacts.First().ContactTel;
            }
            return tel;
        }
    }

}