Question

I’m having a hard time getting the values from a small multiple choice questionnaire posted to the Controller in my MVC4 app:

The model looks like this:

public class Evaluation
{
    public int Id { get; set; }    
    public IEnumerable<MultipleChoiceQuestion> Question { get; set; }    
    public Remark Rem { get; set; }
}

public class MultipleChoiceQuestion
{
    public int Id { get; set; }    
    public string Question { get; set; }    
    public MultipleChoiceAnswer Answer { get; set; }
}

public enum MultipleChoiceAnswer
{
    DISAGREE,
    NEUTRAL,
    AGREE,
    NA,
}

This is the View (leaving out some markup):

@model Models.Evaluation

@using (Html.BeginForm("EvaluationB", "Evaluation", FormMethod.Post))
{
        @foreach (var item in Model.Question)
            {
                @Html.DisplayFor(model => item.Question)
                @Html.EditorFor(model => item.Question, "Enum_RadioButtonList", new { Id = item.Id })
            }
            @Html.Label("Remark")
            @Html.TextAreaFor(model => model.Rem)

                <input type="submit" value="Next" />
}

The “Enum_RadioButtonList” is a View a grabbed from here: https://gist.github.com/973482. It seems like the best way to show enum values in a radiobuttonlist (tho their should be an easier way in MVC 4)

The Controller looks like this:

    public ActionResult EvaluationA()
    {
        Models.Evaluation evm = new Models.Evaluation();
        evm.Question = db.MultipleChoiceQuestions.ToList(); //feeding the View some predefined questions
        return View(evm);
    }

    public ActionResult EvaluationB(Models.Evaluation ev)
    {
        if (ModelState.IsValid)
        {
            // TODO: save model
            return View("EvaluationB", evm);
        }

        return View("EvaluationA", ev);
    }

The questions are loaded fine in the View, but for some reason, the model posted to the Controller remains empty after an HttpPost, and i don’t understand why.

Answer 1

Ive done some more research stumbled upon this post:

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Understanding-ASP-NET-MVC-Model-Binding.aspx

The problem was in the naming of the html fields. Ive added my View like this and now i can read out the values in the Controller correctly:

    @for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++)
    {
    <tr>
        <td>
            @Html.DisplayFor(m => m.Question[i].Question)
        </td>
        <td class="mult_question">
            @Html.EditorFor(m => m.Question[i].Answer, "Enum_RadioButtonList" )
        </td>
    </tr>
    }

<tr>
    <td>
        @Html.Label("Remark")
        @Html.TextAreaFor(m => m.Remark)