Hard time understanding the use of model data in this video

Walter,

Hey there! The MVC design pattern can take awhile to become familiar with, so don't worry if things are completely clear yet.

It's the controller's job to prepare the data for the view. So for our list page, we want our ComicBooksController.Index() method to get the data from the repository (by calling the repository's GetComicBooks() method) and then pass that array of ComicBook objects to the view via our call to the View() method.

Here's the code for the Index() method:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    var comicBooks = _comicBookRepository.GetComicBooks();

    return View(comicBooks);
}

Within the view, we can now access the array of ComicBook objects via the view's Model property, but MVC requires us to specify the data type for the Model property. We do that using a @model directive, like this:

@model ComicBookGallery.Models.ComicBook[]

Once we've "strongly typed" our view to be an array of ComicBook objects, we can then loop over the items in that array like this:

@foreach (var comicBook in Model)
{
}

The important thing to keep in mind is that it's the controller's job to talk to the repository to get the data and then pass that data along to the view. The view will typically never talk to the controller or the repository. You can think of the conversation between the controller and view as a one-sided conversation: the controller communicates to the view, but never the other way around.

I hope this helps.

Thanks, James