Question

So I’m looking at moving from MVC 1.0 to MVC 2.0 RTM. One of the conventions I’d like to start following is using the strongly-typed HTML helpers for generating controls like text boxes.

However, it looks like it won’t be an easy jump. I tried migrating my first form, replacing lines like this:

<%= Html.TextBox("FirstName", Model.Data.FirstName, new {maxlength = 30}) %>

…for lines like this:

<%= Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Data.FirstName, new {maxlength = 30}) %>

Previously, this would map into its appropriate view model on a POST, using the following method signature:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Registration(AccountViewInfo viewInfo)

Instead, it currently gets an empty object back. I believe the disconnect is in the fact that we pass the view model into a larger aggregate object that has some page metadata and other fun stuff along with it (hence x.Data.FirstName instead of x.FirstName).

So my question is: what is the best way to use the strongly-typed helpers while still allowing the MVC framework to appropriately cast the form collection to my view-model as it does in the original line? Is there any way to do it without changing the aggregate type we pass to the view?

Thanks!

UPDATE: So the bind attribute worked well, but I didn’t love how I had to apply it to essentially every posted view model. I ended up changing the inheritance hierarchy such that all of our view models inherit from a base class that contains page content and other meta data, as opposed to being an aggregate property named Data.

Answer 1

public ActionResult Registration([Bind(Prefix = "data")] AccountViewInfo viewInfo);

This tells the binder that it should expect all values to start with data, so it will look for data.FirstName, etc.