how can the Controller detect changes to child entities/rows in a View?

What's the most appropriate approach to the following scenario?

I have two models:

1. TimeSheet: Consisting of four properties: DayStartTime, DayEndTime, BreakTime, List<TimeSheetHours>
2. TimeSheetHours: Consisting of four properties: ClientId, ProjectId, HoursWorked

My time sheet view is strongly typed to a IEnumerable<TimeSheet> list. This list contains 7 TimeSheet models, one for each day of the week Sunday-Saturday. This time sheet view uses an editor tempate to produce input fields for DayStartTime, DayEndTime, BreakTime, for each of the days of week:

Each day contains开发者_如何学编程 a section for clients & projects. Clicking an "add" button fires an ajax function which calls a controller action to render a partial view dynamically inserting a row of controls (Client combobox, Project combobox, HoursWorked textbox) into the appropriate clients & projects section for that day:

I'm having a hard time understanding how I can update each timesheet model's List<TimeSheetHours> when I add a new client/project row via the ajax call.

So in the end, when I submit to the controller for inserting the timesheet, I have everything thing I need for each timesheet model in the list I produced the view.

Any assistance would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

You will either have to massage the names of these elements before they're posted to look like how I have it below or in your ajax call pass in the index of the TimeSheet and then create the name:

TimeSheetHours Index = 0

<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[0]_DayStartTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[0].DayStartTime" value="1" />
<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[0]_DayEndTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[0].DayEndTime" value="2" />
<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[0]_BreakTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[0].BreakTime" value="1" />

TimeSheetHours Index = 1

<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[1]_DayStartTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[1].DayStartTime" value="3" />
<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[1]_DayEndTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[1].DayEndTime" value="4" />
<input type="text" id="TimeSheet[0]_TimeSheetHours[1]_BreakTime" 
    name="TimeSheet[0].TimeSheetHours[1].BreakTime" value="0" />

You're probably much better off intercepting the submit event and iterating over each TimeSheetHours html-represented element and assigning the name as a mask and then submitting the form. This should allow the model binder to reconstruct your List<TimeSheet> with a populated List<TimeSheetHours> property.

Here's a good tutorial on how to solve this issue of posting a collection: ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Binding for a Collection