How do you exclude properties from binding when calling UpdateModel()?

Question

I have a view model sent to the edit action of my controller. The ViewModel contains references to EntityObjects. (yea i\'m fine with it and don\'t need to want to duplicate

Answer 1

Use the Exclude property of the Bind attribute:

[Bind(Exclude="Id,SomeOtherProperty")]
public class SimplifiedCompanyViewModel
{
    public int Id { get; set; }

    // ...
}

This is part of the System.Web.Mvc namespace. It takes a comma-separated list of property names to exclude when binding.

Also you should consider using TryUpdateModel instead of UpdateModel. You can also just have the default model binder figure it out by passing it as an argument to the constructor:

public ActionResult Create([Bind(Exclude="Id")]SimplifiedCompanyViewModel model)
{
    // ...
}