How can I bind checkboxes to a viewmodel in mvc3

Question

I\'m really struggling to wrap my head around this:

I have a UserModel and a UserRoleModel:

    public class UserModel
{
    [Required]
    [Display(Name         


        

Answer 1

The CheckBoxFor helper operates with boolean properties. So you could define a view model:

public class RoleViewModel
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public bool Selected { get; set; }
}

and then modify the AllRoles property on your view model:

public class UserRoleModel
{
    public IEnumerable<RoleViewModel> AllRoles { get; set; }
    public UserModel user { get; set; }

    public UserRoleModel()
    {
        this.AllRoles = Roles.GetAllRoles().Select(r => new RoleViewModel 
        {
            Name = r
        });
        this.user = new UserModel();
    }
}

and in the view instead of writing foreach loops use an editor template:

<div class="editor-field">
    @Html.EditorFor(x => x.AllRoles)
</div>

and finally define an editor template for the RoleViewModel type which will be automatically rendered for each element of the AllRoles collection (~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/RoleViewModel.cshtml)

@model RoleViewModel
@Html.CheckBoxFor(x => x.Selected)
@Html.LabelFor(x => x.Selected, Model.Name)
@Html.HiddenFor(x => x.Name)
<br />

And that's all. Inside the Post action you will get the AllRoles property populated with the values.

Answer 2

As Rob mentioned in the previous answer all the Selected properties will be False. I used this piece of code to cover that.

AllRoles  = Roles.GetAllRoles().Select(r => new RoleViewModel()
{
     Name = r,
     Selected = Roles.GetRolesForUser(uvm.UserProfile.UserName).Contains(r) ? true : false
});