MVC - Model View inside of another Model View

Question

Is it good practice to use one model view inside of another one and how will AutoMapper work with it?

Example:

public class CustomerModelView
{
 public string FullName {get;set;}
 public string IList<OrderListModelView>(get;set;)
}

Answer 1

Yes, we do this quite often. In fact, in many cases we'll re-use ViewModels for partials, so in this case, you could have a partial for IList (or just a single one), so that multiple screens that display the common snippet re-use both the ViewModel and the partial view.

To do this in AutoMapper, you'll need to create a map for Customer -> CustomerModelView and Order -> OrderListModelView. There is nothing special you need to do for lists of items, you only need to map the element types.