Scaffolding in ASP.NET MVC

Scaffolding is a powerful tool in ASP.NET MVC that allows you to create basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations for an entity model. In simple terms, scaffolding helps you generate code by creating templates based on the structure of your database tables.

Syntax

The basic syntax for scaffolding in ASP.NET MVC is:

Scaffold-DbContext "<YOUR_CONNECTION_STRING>" Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer -OutputDir <DIRECTORY_NAME>

The above command creates scaffolding against an existing database. Here, YOUR_CONNECTION_STRING is the connection string to your database, and DIRECTORY_NAME is the name of the directory where the generated files will be stored.

Example

Here's an example of scaffolding in action. Let's assume you have a Customer entity in your database, which has CustomerId, Name and Address fields. To scaffold CRUD operations for this entity, you can use the following command:

Scaffold-DbContext "Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=SampleDB;Integrated Security=True" Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer -OutputDir Models/DB

This will generate the Model and DbContext classes for your entity, along with views for Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations.

Output

When you execute the above command, you will get the following output:

Build started...
Build succeeded.

You can navigate to the specified output directory to see the generated code.

Explanation

Scaffolding works by examining the structure of your entity model and automatically generating views and controllers for CRUD operations based on templates. It generates HTML markup and C# code for views and controllers, which you can customize to fit the needs of your application.

Scaffolding can help you save a lot of time and effort when you need to quickly develop standard CRUD operations for your entity.

Use

Scaffolding is a useful tool to quickly create CRUD operations for your entity models. It can help you save time and effort by generating a large amount of boilerplate code, and allowing you to focus on more important parts of your application.

Important Points

• Scaffolding is a code generation technique used in ASP.NET MVC.
• It generates boilerplate code for standard CRUD operations based on templates.
• Scaffolding is a great time-saver, allowing you to quickly generate code for your entity models.

Summary

In this page, we discussed scaffolding in ASP.NET MVC. We covered the syntax, example, output, explanation, use, and important points of scaffolding. Scaffolding is a powerful tool that can help you generate standard CRUD operations for your entity models. It is a great time-saver, allowing you to quickly generate code and focus on other important parts of your application.