Projection transform a source to a destination beyond flattening the object model. Without extra configuration, AutoMapper requires a flattened destination to match the source type's naming structure. When you want to project source values into a destination that does not exactly match the source structure, you must specify custom member mapping definitions. For example, we might want to turn this source structure:
public class CalendarEvent
{
public DateTime Date { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
}
Into something that works better for an input form on a web page:
public class CalendarEventForm
{
public DateTime EventDate { get; set; }
public int EventHour { get; set; }
public int EventMinute { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
}
Because the names of the destination properties do not exactly match the source property (CalendarEvent.Date
would need to be CalendarEventForm.EventDate
), we need to specify custom member mappings in our type map configuration:
// Model
var calendarEvent = new CalendarEvent
{
Date = new DateTime(2008, 12, 15, 20, 30, 0),
Title = "Company Holiday Party"
};
// Configure AutoMapper
Mapper.Initialize(cfg =>
cfg.CreateMap<CalendarEvent, CalendarEventForm>()
.ForMember(dest => dest.EventDate, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.Date.Date))
.ForMember(dest => dest.EventHour, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.Date.Hour))
.ForMember(dest => dest.EventMinute, opt => opt.MapFrom(src => src.Date.Minute)));
// Perform mapping
CalendarEventForm form = Mapper.Map<CalendarEvent, CalendarEventForm>(calendarEvent);
form.EventDate.ShouldEqual(new DateTime(2008, 12, 15));
form.EventHour.ShouldEqual(20);
form.EventMinute.ShouldEqual(30);
form.Title.ShouldEqual("Company Holiday Party");
Each custom member configuration uses an action delegate to configure each individual member. In the above example, we used the MapFrom
option to perform custom source-to-destination member mappings. The MapFrom
method takes a lambda expression as a parameter, which is then evaluated later during mapping. The MapFrom
expression can be any Func<TSource, object>
lambda expression.