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Wondering why DisplayName attribute is ignored in LabelFor on an overridden property

Asked 2010-03-31T19:07:45.827
19

today I got confused when doing a couple of <%=Html.LabelFor(m=>m.MyProperty)%> in ASP.NET MVC 2 and using the [DisplayName("Show this instead of MyProperty")] attribute from System.ComponentModel.

As it turned out, when I put the attribute on an overridden property, LabelFor didn't seem to notice it.
However, the [Required] attribute works fine on the overridden property, and the generated errormessage actually uses the DisplayNameAttribute.

This is some trivial examplecode, the more realistic scenario is that I have a databasemodel separate from the viewmodel, but for convenience, I'd like to inherit from the databasemodel, add View-only properties and decorating the viewmodel with the attributes for the UI.

public class POCOWithoutDataAnnotations
{
    public virtual string PleaseOverrideMe { get; set; }        
} 
public class EditModel : POCOWithoutDataAnnotations
{
    [Required]
    [DisplayName("This should be as label for please override me!")]
    public override string PleaseOverrideMe 
    {
        get { return base.PleaseOverrideMe; }
        set { base.PleaseOverrideMe = value; }
    }

    [Required]
    [DisplayName("This property exists only in EditModel")]
    public string NonOverriddenProp { get; set; }
}

The strongly typed ViewPage<EditModel> contains:

        <div class="editor-label">
            <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.PleaseOverrideMe) %>
        </div>
        <div class="editor-field">
            <%= Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.PleaseOverrideMe) %>
            <%= Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.PleaseOverrideMe) %>
        </div>

        <div class="editor-label">
            <%= Html.LabelFor(model => model.NonOverriddenProp) %>
        </div>
        <div class="editor-field">
         
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1 Answer

11

I ran into this problem using [DisplayName("Profile Name")] and instead used [Display(Name = "Profile Name")] which fixed the problem in my case. I'm not sure if this would be useful.

The former is from System.ComponentModel whilst the latter is from System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.

answered 2010-11-05T01:16:04.640

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