Question

I have the following which I want to POST to create when I hit submit. Only, when I hit submit I get an object reference error referring to my value for the input with id = debugTxt. I suspect that because I’ve lost the object state, I get this error.

So my question is how can I set the text with an initial view that comes from the Model and allow the user to update on POST?

@using (Html.BeginForm("Create", "PhysDoc"))
{
    <table>
        <tr>
           <td class="title">Debug Mode</td>
           <td>
                This input does the initial GET correctly.  On POST I get object ref error related to the value inside @Model.
                <input type="text" id="debugTxt" name="debugModeTxt" value="@Model.DebugMode" />
            </td>  
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>
                <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
            </td>
        </tr>
    </table>                
}

Create Method (Note the exception is not thrown here).

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Create(string debugModeTxt)
    {
        PhysdocSettings settings = new PhysdocSettings();
        settings.DebugMode = bool.Parse(debugModeTxt);
        PhysDocSettingsBL settingBL = new PhysDocSettingsBL();
        settingBL.UpdateSettings(settings);
        return View("Index");
    } 

The exception occurs here:

value="@Model.DebugMode" and if I change value="True" my code works fine. But this doesn’t give me an initial value equal to Model.DebugMode.

Answer 1

Try this… Use an HTML helper and specify a default value for the field like so:

@Html.TextBox("[name]", @Model.DebugMode)

If this doesn’t work can you elaborate on the result?

---

You aren’t passing a model to Index when you call return View("Index");. You are merely calling the view and as such you will indeed get a Null Reference Exception.