MVC3 .NET - How to add additional information when user enters personal details

Question

I have a View/Screen that allows the user to enter their personal details. There are 2 sections (both contained in the same viewmodel):

1. Your Name - consists of title, forename and surname fields
2. Previous Names - consists of title, forename and surname fields

These are separate entities in the Database and the Model

However, a user could have more than 1 Previous Name and due to space constraints I thought about having an with image, pointing to another View that opens a new Tab in the web browser, rather than a new window as Javascript and/or popups could be disabled.

So, I am unsure if this is the correct approach as I don't see how I can get the additional previous names back to the parent view model.

Another idea (I've had whilst writing this question) is to make the image call a controller method that saves the additional name info to the viewmodel and then redisplay the view with the amended data in the viewmodel - I think this would work with javascript disabled - not very user friendly as the user would have to cycle through the Previous Names if they wanted to delete one of the records....

My ViewModel:

public User user { get; set; }
public List userPreviousNamesList;
public UserPreviousName userPreviousNames { get; set; }

Hmmmmm...... Any solutions/experience for such a scenario are most welcome.

Answer 1

For your first requirement, I believe it's about Binding Nested Models

Please follow this link Editing and binding nested lists with ASP.NET MVC 2