title: How to use CheckBox in View _CreateOrEdit.cshtml for an integer or character database field
body: <p>MVC 3, EntityFramework 4.1, Database First, Razor customization:</p>
  
  <p>I have an old database that sometimes uses Int16 or Char types for a field that must appear as a CheckBox in the MVC _CreateOrEdit.cshtml View.  If it is an Int, 1=true and 0=false. If it is a Char, "Y"=true and "N"=false.  This is too much for the Entity Framework to convert automatically.  For the Details View, I can use:</p>
  
  <pre><code>@Html.CheckBox("SampleChkInt", Model.SampleChkInt==1?true:false)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But this won't work in place of EditorFor in the _CreateOrEdit.cshtml View.
  How to do this?  I was thinking of a custom HtmlHelper, but the examples I've found don't show me how to tell EntityFramework to update the database properly.  There are still other such customizations that I might like to do, where the MVC View does not match the database cleanly enough for EntityFramework to do an update.  Answering this question would be a good example.  I am working on a sample project, using the following automatically generated (so I can't make changes to it) model class:</p>
  
  <pre><code>namespace AaWeb.Models
  {
      using System;
      using System.Collections.Generic;
  
      public partial class Sample
      {
          public int SampleId { get; set; }
          public Nullable&lt;bool&gt; SampleChkBit { get; set; }
          public Nullable&lt;short&gt; SampleChkInt { get; set; }
          public Nullable&lt;System.DateTime&gt; SampleDate { get; set; }
          public string SampleHtml { get; set; }
          public Nullable&lt;int&gt; SampleInt { get; set; }
          public Nullable&lt;short&gt; SampleYesNo { get; set; }
          public string Title { get; set; }
          public byte[] ConcurrencyToken { get; set; }
      }
  }
  </code></pre>