ASP.NET MVC 5 with Bootstrap and Knockout.js

Chapter 14. Building the Data Model

Once again, Entity Framework will be used as the ORM of choice for fetching and saving data for the shopping cart. This chapter will create the Code-First data models, instantiate some sample data, and create the necessary ViewModels that will be used by the MVC application.

Code-First Models

I am envisioning five models that will be required for the shopping cart:

Author model

This model will contain information about the book’s author.

Book model

This model will contain information about the book being sold, including things like the price, an author foreign key, and a category foreign key.

Category model

This model will contain an ID and name of the category. Each book will belong to one category (for simplicity).

Cart model

This model will contain a unique identifier of the user who owns the shopping cart. Each visitor to the site will be associated to a Cart model.

CartItem model

This model will contain which book and how many are being purchased. This object is a child to the Cart model.

The following examples contain these model definitions, as well as their inter-relationships with each other. Inside the Models folder, one file per model can be created. I’ve named each file the same as the class name.

Example 14-1 contains the Author model, which introduces a new feature of Entity Framework with the attribute NotMapped. I have created a FullName variable, which concantenates the first and last name into a single variable. By tagging ...