Continuation of ViewState post...

So what I thought was non trivial about combining a model created from my "ViewState" and the normal binding turned out to be extraordinarily trivial. You can override the code that creates the model in DefaultModelBinder. So I simply do the following:


public class ViewStateModelBinder : DefaultModelBinder
{
    protected override object CreateModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, 
        ModelBindingContext bindingContext, Type modelType)
    {
        string modelName = bindingContext.ModelType.FullName;
        ValueProviderResult clientObject = 
            bindingContext.ValueProvider.GetValue(modelName);
        return clientObject == null
            ? base.CreateModel(controllerContext, bindingContext, modelType)
            : ModelCompressor.Decompress(bindingContext.ModelType, 
                clientObject.AttemptedValue);
    }
}

So instead of using some reflection call to create a object of my model type I create the base object using the compressed object. Sweet!

I learned you can do something like

ModelBinders.Binders.DefaultBinder = new ViewStateModelBinder ();

So this is pretty much a complete solution. Deploying it would involve adding the dll. Adding a line like the above setting the default model binder and then to use it all you need to do is write the Html helper line. I will probably make some HtmlHelper extension to make this look more special, but this was surprisingly easy and I think it is a powerful solution.

So if it is this easy to extend the model binding I would have to say that it is well engineered.