With a background in ASP.Net web forms, the Html.CheckBox used with ASP.Net MVC did not behave how I thought it would.
For example when adding a checkbox to the View inside a table:
1: <%=Html.CheckBox("cb" + item.player.idPlayer)%>
Firebug shows me this rendered in the html source of the page:
What is that hidden field for???
A developer on the Microsoft ASP.Net team said that this was by design so that we can properly assign a value of ‘false’ to an unchecked checkbox (link).
I’m assuming this was the fix for the issue in the MVC 1.0 RC builds where a null value was being returning for unchecked checkboxes.
But in ASP.Net MVC 1.0, here is what the Request.Form values are (notice all checkbox inputs are listed with either a value of ‘false’ or ‘true’):
So in my case to loop through the returned inputs and grab the Player ID’s which have been checked:
Here is the controller action code to look for checked checkboxes (from Andrey Tkach on Stack Overflow):
1: var selectedPlayerIds = new List<int>();
2: IEnumerable<Player> players;
3:
4: foreach (string key in Request.Form)
5: {
6: var checkBox = String.Empty;
7: if(key.StartsWith("cb"))
8: {
9: checkBox = Request.Form["" + key];
10: if (checkBox != "false")
11: {
12: int id = Convert.ToInt32(key.Remove(0, 2));
13: selectedPlayerIds.Add(id);
14: }
15: }
16: }
I am now able to use these playerID’s for interaction with the repository and perform interesting logic.
Tags: asp.net mvc 1.0, web development, checkbox