AutoMapper 101

Early this morning, a newbie MVC developer approached me for help to make the AutoMapper works.

Here's our simple work around:

Inside the Global.asax.cs,

Application Start()
{
.....
MyAutoMap();
}

public void MyAutoMap()
        {
            Mapper.Reset();
            Mapper.CreateMap<DogViewModel, Dog>();
            Mapper.CreateMap<Dog, DogViewModel>();
            Mapper.AssertConfigurationIsValid();
        }

But of course we make sure he had a ViewModel. He simply copied the Dog.cs (model) to Models folder and renamed it to DogViewModel.

In his test case, we replaced his model to
       var model = new DogViewModel();

And in Controller, we modified his code to something like this

        public ActionResult Create()
        {
              return View(new DogViewModel());
        }
        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult Create(DogViewModel viewDog)
        {
            if (ModelState.IsValid)
            {
                Dog dog = AutoMapper.Mapper.Map<DogViewModel, Dog>(viewDog);
                _repo.CreateDog(dog);
                _repo.SaveChanges();
                return RedirectToAction("Index", "Animal");
            }
            return View();
        }