What is the best way to maintain an entity's original properties when they are not included in MVC binding from edit page?
- by kingdango
I have an ASP.NET MVC view for editing a model object. The edit page includes most of the properties of my object but not all of them -- specifically it does not include CreatedOn and CreatedBy fields since those are set upon creation (in my service layer) and shouldn't change in the future.
Unless I include these properties as hidden fields they will not be picked up during Binding and are unavailable when I save the modified object in my EF 4 DB Context. In actuality, upon save the original values would be overwritten by nulls (or some type-specific default).
I don't want to drop these in as hidden fields because it is a waste of bytes and I don't want those values exposed to potential manipulation.
Is there a "first class" way to handle this situation? Is it possible to specify a EF Model property is to be ignored unless explicitly set?