I just stumbled over a funny little thing in the HTML output from the Html.CheckBox() helper method in ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

In my .ASPX file, I had defined a checkbox like this

<%=Html.CheckBox("MyCheckBox") %>

 
This resulted in the following HTML output:

<input id="MyCheckBox" name="MyCheckBox" type="checkbox" value="true" /><input name="MyCheckBox" type="hidden" value="false" /> 

A bit stumped as to why I got an extra hidden field, I decided to have a look in the ASP.NET MVC source code and found the following comment:

if (inputType == InputType.CheckBox) {
    // Render an additional <input type="hidden".../> for checkboxes. This
    // addresses scenarios where unchecked checkboxes are not sent in the request.
    // Sending a hidden input makes it possible to know that the checkbox was present
    // on the page when the request was submitted.
...

This is really quite logical. The reason it works is that the first time a browser hits an element with a value attribute, the parser will ignore all subsequent elements with the same name. This way, we’ll always get a result back to our controller containing all the checkboxes that are present on the page, no matter if they are checked or not.