How to handle checkboxes in ASP.NET MVC forms?
- by Will
This seems a bit bizarre to me, but as far as I can tell, this is how you do it.
I have a collection of objects, and I want users to select one or more of them. This says to me "form with checkboxes." My objects don't have any concept of "selected" (they're rudimentary POCO's formed by deserializing a wcf call). So, I do the following:
public class SampleObject{
public Guid Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
}
In the view:
<%
using (Html.BeginForm())
{
%>
<%foreach (var o in ViewData.Model) {%>
<%=Html.CheckBox(o.Id)%> <%= o.Name %>
<%}%>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
<%}%>
And, in the controller, this is the only way I can see to figure out what objects the user checked:
public ActionResult ThisLooksWeird(FormCollection result)
{
var winnars = from x in result.AllKeys
where result[x] != "false"
select x;
// yadda
}
Its freaky in the first place, and secondly, for those items the user checked, the FormCollection lists its value as "true false" rather than just true.
Obviously, I'm missing something. I think this is built with the idea in mind that the objects in the collection that are acted upon within the html form are updated using UpdateModel() or through a ModelBinder.
But my objects aren't set up for this; does that mean that this is the only way? Is there another way to do it?
