in asp.net mvc what's a clean way to create an entity from the 'create' view of another entity?

I am trying to come up with a clean design for this -

I am using MVC to process orders, so I have an 'order' entity, with its own controller and views.

From the Create Order view I would like the user to add a 'Customer' entity. I have a controller and CRUD operations for 'customer'.

When s开发者_开发百科omeone creates a new Order I would like them to either

1) enter a customer name to see if that customer already exists, and if so, add that Customer to the Order, or

2) Create a new Customer then add that new Customer to the Order.

My problem is I am not sure of a good way to access the Customers from within the Order.

-do I create a partial view for Create Customer, then use that view in the Customer Create AND Order Create? -then would I create a partial view 'SearchCustomers' that passes params to an action on Customer controller and that returns results? Would I be able to reuse this across the site?

You can see I am not sure about a few things - are partial views the way to reuse things? can partial views be reused across controllers and access different controllers from the ones theyre in?

I have gone through an MVC book and online tutorials but they all seem to use beginner examples, where Model objects don't contain other Model objects.

Thanks for help

Views never "access controllers".

The flow is:

Controller Action Method -> Creates View Model -> Hands it off to a View -> View displays it -> View can pass sub-models on to other partial views

Decomposing everything into smaller models and partial views (or using Editor templates) is a good approach. You can then assemble those smaller models into a larger view model for a complete page, or you can use the ViewBag to assemble them in a non-strongly typed manner.