Question

I have a simple form in my MVC3 site that allows users to create a contest entry. This has been implemented and works fine currently, but a request has been made to now allow users to make their entries private.

In my Entry model I added a boolean isPrivate. Then I figured I would change the HTML forms for create and edit to include a checkbox to specify whether the entry should be private.

I’m new to MVC3, but I figured I could simply change the action that the form posts to by including a new boolean parameter.

This unfortunately doesn’t seem to work. Can anyone tell me how checkbox values are passed from an HTML form to a post action? This is probably fairly common, but I can’t seem to find an example for this on the web. Almost all the examples out there simple show text inputs, I can’t find anything with checkboxes.

Form:

        <form method="post" action="../Entry/Create" enctype="multipart/form-data" onsubmit="return isValidInput()">
            <input type="text" id="EntryTitle" name="EntryTitle" />
            <div id="invalidTitle" class="invalidData"></div>
            <p id="char-remaining">(100 characters remaining)</p>

            <input type="text" id="EntryVideo" name="EntryVideo" />
            <div id="invalidVideo" class="invalidData"></div>
            <p id="vid-desc">(URL of the Video to Embed)</p>

            <input type="file" id="ImageFile" name="ImageFile" />
            <div id="invalidImage" class="invalidData"></div>
            <p id="file-desc">(200x200px, jpeg, png, or gif)</p>

            <textarea id="EntryDesc" name="EntryDesc"></textarea>
            <div id="invalidDesc" class="invalidData"></div>
            <br />

            <input type="checkbox" id="isPrivate" name="isPrivate" />
            Make my entry private.

            <br />

            (private entries will only be viewable by you and site administrators)

            <br />


            <button id="new-entry-save">save</button>
        </form>

Action:

public ActionResult Create(string EntryTitle, string EntryVideo, HttpPostedFileBase ImageFile, string EntryDesc, Boolean isPrivate)
{
...
}

Answer 1

add value=”true” to checkbox, also add hidden input after it with same name and value=false, i.e.:

<input type="checkbox" id="isPrivate" name="isPrivate" value="true" />
<input type="hidden" name="isPrivate" value="false" />

If you don’t want to use hidden, use bool? instead of bool (e.g. nullable)