Html.EditorFor, Model Property vs RouteData Value

By | May 13, 2012

The ASP.NET MVC team made our lives easier when they created the Html editor extension method Html.EditoFor(); you just pass the model property and it creates the right editor, filling it with the property’s value…but not always!

Let’s consider that we have the conventional route definition:

routes.MapRoute(

                "Default", // Route name

                "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters

                new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults

            );

and this simple action method:

public ActionResult MyAction(int? id)

{

    var result = new Person() { Id = 3, Name = "My Name" };

 

    return View(result);

}

and this form view:

@using (Html.BeginForm())

{

    @Html.EditorFor( m => m.Id )

    <br />

    @Html.EditorFor( m => m.Name )

    <br />

    <input type="submit" value="Submit" />

}

If you have noticed, in the action method “MyAction” I didn’t make use of the passed “id” parameter; I know this is a rare case, but maybe for a rare business scenario you want to return a very similar model rather than the requested one. In our case we will return the model with the id = 3 no matter what, just for the sake of the argument.

Now if you call for the request “http://localhost:2085/MyController/MyAction” everything works as expected, and you will have the following view result:

CropperCapture[5] 

But if  you call for the request “http://localhost:2085/MyController/MyAction/5”, the result will be:

CropperCapture[6]

As you have noticed, the Html.EditorFor ignored the value of the property “id” in the model, and instead used the RouteData value of the key “id” passed through the URL.

Most likely this is by design; I can’t think of how a bug in the code could produce this. But according to how I see things, this can be really confusing; I should be expecting the value of the property I passed instead of the routedata value.

What do YOU think?

3 thoughts on “Html.EditorFor, Model Property vs RouteData Value

  1. Ayyash

    personally, as a front end developer I was always careful with asp:controls generated by ASP.NET, and now these stupid looking non-workable objects, i havent dug deep into it but i promise u this much: we shall never be friends 🙂 too invasive, non HTML friendly.. i tried to code up my own helper when i realized i need to pass my attributes in an object and not get my IDE to swiggle HTML mistakes for me.. fashar, i want my HTML to look like HTML, not some weird switch-context misplaced C# – i hate the fact that they rolled back to context switching, we were good with our custom tags 🙁

  2. Emad Alashi Post author

    Hehe, I think the ASP.NET MVC are already going in the right direction, the HTML abstraction is becoming lighter, though you are bound to the logic they found proper, just like this case.
    Thank god they had the great decision of making ASP.NET MVC as flexible as it is now; anything you don’t like, you can replace. 🙂

  3. Vitaliy Markitanov

    For me it is bug. If I bind to model, I want model, why would it take value from who knows where…

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