Question

I refactored some common properties into a base class and immediately my model updates started failing. UpdateModel() and TryUpdateModel() did not seem to update inherited public properties.

I cannot find detailed info on MSDN nor Google as to the rules or semantics of these methods. The docs are terse (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd470933.aspx), simply stating:

Updates the specified model instance using values from the controller’s current value provider.

SOLVED: MVC.NET does indeed handle inherited properties just fine. This turned out to have nothing to do with inheritance. My base class was implemented with public fields, not properties. Switching them to formal properties (adding {get; set; }) was all I needed. This has bitten me before, I keep wanting to use simple, public fields. I would argue that fields and properties are syntactically identical, and could be argued to be semantically equivalent, for the user of the class.

Answer 1

MVC will bind to properties of the inherited class. The model binder calls something like typeof(yourtype).GetProperties() which returns all the inherited members just fine.

Just tested it out with:

public class PersonBase
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class User : PersonBase
{
    public string FavoriteFood { get; set; }
}

“My assumption is the methods are reflecting on the top class only,”

How would that work? The “top” class IS the base class too.