Create a Customer from a Guest - using MVC3, C#, Entity Framework, Razor Views, SQL Server

Question

I am adding a function into my program that allows Employees to convert event guest to customers, so they don't have to retype everything.

The one problem I am running into is... The guest has a phone # and rmail in the same table as the rest of their information. Customers have their phone #'s and emails stored in separate one-to-many table.

So during the conversion I need a CustomerID to assign to the email & phone number to store it to the tables.

How do I create the customer and retain the CustomerID in order to use to assign to the CustomerEmail and CustomerPhone tables?

I have a ViewModel to handle all the variables.

What do I have to do to the code below to have it assign a CustomerID in order to successfully call SaveChanges() for CustomerPhones && CustomerEmails ?

var customerNew = new Customer
                {
                    CustomerTypeId = customer.CustomerTypeId,
                    FirstName = customer.FirstName,
                    LastName = customer.LastName,
                    FullName = customer.FirstName + " " + customer.LastName,
                    Birthday = customer.Birthday,
                    GenderId = customer.GenderId,
                    CompanyName = customer.CompanyName,
                    UserName = customer.UserName,
                    FavMusicId = customer.FavMusicId,
                    OwnerId = customer.OwnerId
                };

                var phoneNew = new CustomerPhone
                {
                    CustomerId = customer.CustomerId,
                    Number = customer.Number,
                    PhoneTypeId = 5
                };

                var emailNew = new CustomerEmail
                {
                    CustomerId = customer.CustomerId,
                    Email = customer.Email
                };

                db.Customers.AddObject(customerNew);
                db.CustomerPhones.AddObject(phoneNew);
                db.CustomerEmails.AddObject(emailNew);

                db.SaveChanges();

                return RedirectToAction("Details", new { id = customer.CustomerId });

Thank you,

Tim

EXTRA Bonus Points: If you can tell me how to automatically delete the guest from the database after the customer creation, without having to click anything else. :)

Answer 1

If you have set up proper foreign key relationships on the database level, and your EF model has picked them up, you should be able to write:

var customerNew = new Customer
                  {
                      // ... set all the properties here
                  }

var phoneNew = new CustomerPhone
            {
                Number = customer.Number,
                PhoneTypeId = 5
            };
customerNew.CustomerPhones.Add(phoneNew);  // add new phone to the association

var emailNew = new CustomerEmail
            {
                Email = customer.Email
            };
customerNew.CustomerEMails.Add(phoneNew);  // add new e-mail to the association

db.Customers.AddObject(customerNew);
db.SaveChanges();

and let EF handle all the rest like figuring out the ID's and everything.

Answer 2

Sned the guest information (complete) into a stored procedure that creates the new records (customer, phone and email).

EXTRA Bonus Points options

1. Add a delete to the stored procedure - benefit here is you can put this in a transaction
2. Add a trigger that deletes the guest based on the insert into the client table - very effective if everyone is a guest before they are a customer

Point here is you don't have to solve this in MVC alone, since persistence is the real issue, not the user experience.