Set TextBox value from ViewBag list in MVC5 C#

Question

How can I set TextBox value in MVC5 from ViewBag which contains a list? As you can see my list is in Viewbag.photos and I want to have each value of photo.id in my TextBox and then pass it to controller

 @foreach (var photo in ViewBag.photos)
     {
            @if (@photo.comment != null)
            {
              <h6>@photo.comment</h6>
            }
            else
            {
              <h6> - </h6>
            }
            @Html.TextBox("photoID", @photo.id)

     }

Trying to do that I get an error:

Error CS1973 'HtmlHelper>' has no applicable method named 'TextBox' but appears to have an extension method by that name. Extension methods cannot be dinamically dispached.

Maybe there's another workaround?

Answer 1

This is happening because ViewBag.photos is a dynamic object. The compiler cannot know its type, so you have to manually cast it to its original type.

For example:

@Html.TextBox("photoID", (int)photo.id)

As a side note (I'm not sure whether this will prevent your code from working, but it's good practice anyway), you also have bit too many @ s: to cite Visual Studio, once inside code, you do not need to prefix constructs like "if" with "@" . So your final code will look like:

 @foreach (var photo in ViewBag.photos)
 {
     if (photo.comment != null)
     {
         <h6>@photo.comment</h6>
     }
     else
     {
         <h6> - </h6>
     }
     @Html.TextBox("photoID", (int)photo.id)
 }

You should also consider using ViewModels instead of ViewBag to pass data between your controllers and your views.