If you have a model object with a property named Id, you may have run into an issue where your model state is invalid when binding to that model even though you don’t have an “Id” field in your form.
The following scenario should clear up what I mean. Suppose you have the following simple model with two properties.
public class Product {
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
And you are creating a view to create a new Product. In such a view, you obviously don’t want the user to specify the Id.
<% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%>
<fieldset>
<legend>Fields</legend>
<div class="editor-label">
<%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) %>
</div>
<div class="editor-field">
<%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %>
<%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %>
</div>
<p>
<input type="submit" value="Create" />
</p>
</fieldset>
<% } %>
However, when you post it to an action method like so:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Index(Product p)
{
if (!ModelState.IsValid) {
throw new InvalidOperationException("Modelstate not valid");
}
return View();
}
You’ll find that the model state is not valid. What gives!?
Well the issue here is that the Id property of Product is being set to an empty string. Why is that happening when there is no “Id” field in your form? The answer to that, my friend, is routing.
When you crack open a freshly created ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application, you’ll notice the following default route defined.
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);
To refresh your memory, that’s a route with three URL parameters (controller, action, id), each with a default value ("home", "index", "").
What this means is if you post a form to the URL /Home/Index, without specifying an “ID” in the URL, you’ll still have an empty string route value for the key “id”. And as it turns out, we use route values to bind to action method parameters.
In the scenario above, it just so happens that your model object happens to have a property with the same name, “Id”, as that route value, so the model binder attempts to set the value of the Id property to empty string, and since Id is a non-nullable int, we get a type conversion error.
This wouldn’t be so bad if “Id” wasn’t such a common name for properties. ;)
In ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2, we added an MVC specific means to work around this issue via the new UrlParameter.Optional value. If you set the default value for a URL parameter to this special value, MVC makes sure to remove that key from the route value dictionary so that it doesn’t exist.
Thus the fix to the above scenario is to change the default route to:
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
With this in place, if there’s no ID in the URL, there won’t be a value for ID in the route values and thus we’ll never try to set a property named “Id” unless you have a form field named “Id”.
Note that this should be the default in the project templates for ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM.