ASP.NET MVC Html.RadioButton Exception

Question

I haver a simple radio button list on my page that I render with the following in my view:

Gender
<%=         


        

Answer 1

I just tried something that makes this work. The problem does not occur if I do not do the validation step but of course I need the validation. That gave me a clue for the solution.

The ValidationMessage HtmlHelper method takes a string argument that is the name of the property or model object being validated. I just changed that name to be "gender2" as follows:

Gender
<%= Html.RadioButton("gender", 1) %> Male
<%= Html.RadioButton("gender", 2) %> Female
<%= Html.ValidationMessage("gender2") %>

And I changed the validation code to refer to this new name (even though that property does not exist, it still works):

if (!gender.HasValue)
    ModelState.AddModelError("gender2", "gender required");

This works as desired.

I would have thought the other should have worked, but this is a simple workaround and I am documenting that here.

EDIT: By the way I tried changing the gender property to a string instead of a nullable int, and the same exact problem occurs.

The work around still seems to be in using a different key name for the Validation Message.