How to call data from two tables in a single View when created models with Entity Framework in ASP.net MVC

Question

I have two tables whose structure is as follows:

Employee:

int Id
string EmployeeName 
string Department

Department:

int Dept_Id
string Department   

Department Table Stores All the Departments with their respective id, and i have a registration form of Employee which contains DropDownList. I want to populate all of the departments as soon as the form loads in the dropdown for that i have to call two models on the same view. I was using tuple but it does not solve my problem. Please help to solve my problem. Code that i am using is :

public ActionResult Index()
{

 var model = new model<Employee, Department>(new Employee(), new Department());

    return View(model);
}


@model Tuple<MVcEmpApp.Models.Employee, MVcEmpApp.Models.Department>    


[HttpPost]
public ActionResult InsertRecord(MyViewModel model)
{
if(ModelState.IsValid)
 {
   var Employee=new Employee();
   Employee.EmployeeName=model.employee.EmployeeName;
   Employee.Department=model.employee.Department;
   db.AddToEmployee(Employee);
   db.SaveChanges();
  }
}

Please give any suggestions, Thanks for your answers....

Answer 1

You can create a single ViewModel wrapper class which holds your two models. Read What is ViewModel in MVC?

public class MyViewModel
{
  public Employee employee{get;set;}
  public Department dept{get;set;}

}

Controller

public ActionResult Index()
{

    var model = new MyViewModel{employee=new Employee(), dept=new Department()}

    return View(model);
}

In your view

@model MyViewModel

<label>First Name</label> 
 @Html.TextBoxFor(m=>m.Employee.FirstName)

Answer 2

I would create two classes Employee and Department as entities.

Your model then would be

public class MyModel 
{
    public Employee employee {get; set;}

    public List<Department> departments {get; set;}
}

You can in this scenario wire up your dropdown to the departments. You will want to add javascript to populate a hidden field on your page with the selected value - which you can wireup to the employee's department id field. This way when you submit your form your action can be written as -

public ActionResult Submit(Employee employee) { .... }