Using dependency injection in views

In this recipe, you will learn what a dependency injection is and how to use it in ASP.NET Core MVC views. We will see how to inject a list of category objects to bind a drop-down list in the AddProduct.cshtml view.

The dependency injection mechanism lets a class get an object through the constructor parameter, instead of calling a factory method, such as the following code:

public ClassA (ClassB _object) { 
    this.object = _object; 
} 

Use following code instead of preceding code:

public ClassA() { 
    this.object = FactoryClass.GetObjectB(); 
} 

Getting ready

We will create an empty web application with ASP.NET Core MVC enabled by adding the MVC dependency into the project:

"Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc": "2.0.0"

How to do it...

1. First, let's create the Dto and the ViewModel objects:

public class ProductDto
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public decimal Price { get; set; }
}
public class ProductViewModel
{
  public int Id { get...