Question

In my .cshtml, I’m painting some data. Then I have a repy textbox and a button for people to reply to a customer service thread.

@using (Html.BeginForm("Update", "CustomerServiceMessage", FormMethod.Post, new { id = 0 }))
    ...
}

When I submit, I don’t get 0 when it hits my Update actionmethod, I get the id of the parent Service message I painted above the reply box. So it’s like an email/forum thread but even though I hard code the = 0 the Update method is getting an Id of the parent message that I painted on the screen (rendered).

Can’t figure out why.

Answer 1

When I submit, I don’t get 0 when it hits my Update action method

That’s normal, you never send this id to your server. You just used the wrong overload of the Html.BeginForm helper:

@using (Html.BeginForm(
    "Update",                        // actionName
    "CustomerServiceMessage",        // controllerName
    FormMethod.Post,                 // method
    new { id = 0 }                   // htmlAttributes
))
{
    ...    
}

and you ended up with the following markup (assuming default routes):

<form id="0" method="post" action="/CustomerServiceMessage/Update">
    ...
</form>

See the problem?

And here’s the correct overload:

@using (Html.BeginForm(
    "Update",                        // actionName
    "CustomerServiceMessage",        // controllerName
    new { id = 0 },                  // routeValues
    FormMethod.Post,                 // method
    new { @class = "foo" }           // htmlAttributes
))
{
    ...    
}

which generates (assuming default routes):

<form method="post" action="/CustomerServiceMessage/Update/0">
    ...
</form>

Now, you will get your id=0 inside the corresponding controller action.

By the way you could make your code more readable and avoid this kind of mistakes by using C# 4.0 named parameters:

@using (Html.BeginForm(
    actionName: "Update", 
    controllerName: "CustomerServiceMessage", 
    routeValues: new { id = 0 }, 
    method: FormMethod.Post,
    htmlAttributes: new { @class = "foo" }
))
{
    ...    
}