Why your MVC 3 Razor model object might be empty on post

Sometimes it is the obvious things that trip us up the most.  I had this class to be used in an ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor project.

 public class SpecialOffer
{
        public int ID { get; set; }

        [Required(ErrorMessage = "Offer Description is required")]
        public string Offer { get; set; }
}

And in my controller the folowing

    public ActionResult OfferCreate()
   {
      return View(new SpecialOffer());
   }

        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult OfferCreate(SpecialOffer Offer)
        {
            if (ModelState.IsValid)
            {
                try
                {
                    _repository.InsertOffer(Offer);
                    return RedirectToAction("OfferIndex");
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    //error msg for failed insert in XML file
                    ModelState.AddModelError("", "Error creating record. " + ex.Message);
                }
            }

            return View(Offer);
        }

So, why did my SpecialOffer offer object always return from my razor view as a null object?  Simple because the object and one of its properties share the same name – Offer.Offer.  This confuses the automatic binding used by MVC.

In the end I did not like the property name anyway.  SpecialOffer.Offer did not read well so it became SpecialOffer.Description.  And that fixes the problem with the automatic binding.  I could also have just returned the model object as myOffer or model and still corrected the problem.

Simple, basic stuff.  But annoying when things like that happen.

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