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Asked: 2026-05-11T00:28:11+00:00

I am wondering if there is a way to make ASP.NET controls play nicely

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I am wondering if there is a way to make ASP.NET controls play nicely with my ASP.NET MVC app. Here is what I am doing.

I have an order page which displays info about a single Order object. The page will normally have a bunch of rows of data, each row representing an OrderItem object. Each row is an ASP.NET User Control. On the user control there is a form element with two text boxes (Quantity and Price), and an update button.

When I click the update button, I expect the form to post the data for that individual OrderItem row to a controller method and update the OrderItem record in the database.

Here is my problem: When the post happens, the framework complains because the fields on the form don’t match the parameters on the controller method. Each form field is something like ‘OrderItem_1$Quantity’ or ‘OrderItem_2$Price’ instead of just ‘Quantity’ or ‘Price’ which would match my method parameters.

I have been told that I can overcome this by making sure that the IDs of all my controls are unique for the page, but allow the NAMEs to be repeated between different forms, so that if a form for an individual row is posted, the name can be something that will match what is on my controller method.

The only problem is that I am using ASP.NET controls for my text boxes (which I REALLY want to continue doing) and I can’t find any way to override the name field. There is no Name propery on an ASP.NET control, and even when I try to set it using the Attributes accessor property by saying ‘control.Attributes[‘Name’] = ‘Price’;’ it just adds another name= attribute to the HTML tag which doesn’t work.

Does any one know how I can make this work? I really don’t like all of the HtmlHelper functions like TextBox and DropDown because I hate having my .aspx be so PHP or ASP like with the <%%> tags and everything. Thanks!

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  1. I think you’re straddled between two worlds of ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC. You really need to use the Html.TextBox methods, etc. in MVC. This gives you complete control over the markup, which is one of the main benefits of MVC.

    The very problem you’re having with control over the generated HTML, e.g. getting two name attributes, is exactly what MVC is designed to address. If you stop fighting it and go with the flow, it’ll work much better.

    <% %> tags aren’t a problem unless you have logic in there. Putting simple presentation logic on your view is fine.

    If you don’t like this, then maybe it’s better to stick with standard ASP.NET.

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