Its useful to be able to have a helper that converts a Enum typed property from an MVC Model directly into a drop down list without any messing about creating lists of possible values etc.
I found this answer on StackOverflow which has example code for just such a helper: EnumDropDownListFor. However, like a few who have tried it I found some issues around getting it to work to pre-select the value held in the Model’s property.
This is a two part piece on working with Interfaces in MVC via the Html.EditorFor helper.
In the first part – “Display” just covers one of those things I tried on the off chance, and was rather surprised that it worked right out of the box.
In this second part I’ll have a look at the next step of the process – binding these interfaces back to their models.
For reference, I’m working with MVC4, in VS 2012 For Web. I think this will also work in MVC3 at least.
Background
When model data is posted back from the client, an instance of the model class is automatically created for it and passed to the handling action. The process of converting the data into a model instance is called binding, and, normally, this is handled for us automatically.
If, as in Part 1, we’re using an interface as a model, and then allowing EditorFor to automatically render the correct controls this processes stops working, as the automatic binding isn’t able to resolve our interface into a concrete class to instantiate and fill.
Instead we have to implement a custom binding. In the case of interfaces we can make this fairly simple with Generic BaseInterfaceBinder that will work for all interfaces we might want to work with.
This is a two part piece on working with Interfaces in MVC via the Html.EditorFor helper.
The first part – “Display” just covers one of those things I tried on the off chance, and was rather surprised that it worked right out of the box.
In the second part I’ll have a look at the next step of the process – binding these interfaces back to their models.
For reference, I’m working with MVC4, in VS 2012 For Web. I think this will also work in MVC3 at least.
Background
For a slightly messy user interface I’m working on, I wanted to be able to have a Model that holds a list of classes that implement an interface.
There is a possibility that all the classes might not be the same, and I was concerned that I was going to end up with a messy switch statement in my View that called the right Partial depending on which class I found in the list, and that this switch might need to be maintained on an on-going basis.
