Hi

A default value of 0 is creeping into a Surveys app I am developing, for no reason that I can see. The problem is as follows:

I have a group of Html.RadioButtons that represent the possible values a user can choose to answer a survey question (1 == Not at all, 2 == A little, 3 == A lot). I have used a tinyint datatype, that does not allow null, to store the answer to each question.

The view code looks like this:

<ol class="SurveyQuestions">
    <% foreach (SurveyQuestion question in Model.Questions)
       {  

             string col = question.QuestionColumn;     
    %>

        <li><%=question.QuestionText%>
            <ul style="float:right;" class="MultiChoice">
                <li><%= Html.RadioButton(col, "1")%></li>
                <li><%= Html.RadioButton(col, "2")%></li>
                <li><%= Html.RadioButton(col, "3")%></li>
            </ul>
            <%= Html.ValidationMessage(col, "*") %>
        </li>
    <% } %>

</ol>

[Note on the above code:]

Each survey has about 70 questions, so I have put the questions text in one table, and store the results in a different table. I have put the Questions into my form view model (hence Model.Questions); the questions table has a field called QuestionColumn that allows me to link up the answer table column to the question, as shown above (<%= Html.RadioButton(col, "1")%>, etc)

[/Note]

However, when the user DOESN'T answer the question, the value 0 is getting inserted into the database column. As a result, I don't get what I expect, ie, a validation error.

In no place have I stipulated a default value of 0 for the fields in the answers table.

So what is happening? Any ideas?