This is a good situation to be using ViewModels.
Build your ViewModels with all properties that you'd want to send/retrieve to/from your view. For example:
EF Entity
public class Car {
public virtual Guid Id { get; set; }
public virtual string Name { get; set; }
public virtual string Make { get; set; }
public virtual string Year { get; set; }
}
View Model
public class AddCarViewModel {
public Car Car { get; set; }
public bool RememberValues { get; set; }
}
Controller
public class CarController : Controller {
// Constructor....
public ActionResult Add() {
var vm = new AddCarViewModel();
return View(vm);
}
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Add(AddCarViewModel vm) {
if (ModelState.IsValid) {
_carService.Save(vm.Car);
}
return View(vm);
}
}
Another good approach is to create Domain Transfer Objects, which are POCO classes to hold data that is transferred through the pipes. For example, in your business layer you may want to audit any changes to your Car model. So you may have properties like CreatedBy, CreatedDate, UpdatedBy, UpdatedDate, etc. (These properties are generally never displayed to the end-user but are important to store).
So you'd create the following classes:
public class Car {
public virtual Guid Id { get; set; }
public virtual string Name { get; set; }
public virtual string Make { get; set; }
public virtual string Year { get; set; }
public virtual User CreatedBy { get; set; }
public virtual User UpdatedBy { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime CreatedDate { get; set; }
public virtual DateTime UpdatedDate { get; set; }
}
public class CarDTO {
public Guid Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Make { get; set; }
public string Year { get; set; }
}
and you can use a library such as AutoMapper to map properties from Car -> CarDTO:
var car = _carService.GetCarById(id);
var carDTO = Mapper.Map<Car, CarDTO>(car);
This way, you can choose which properties you want exposed to your views by utilizing DTO's.