Asp.net-mvc – ASP.NET MVC 3 localization with DisplayAttribute and custom resource provider

asp.net-mvcasp.net-mvc-3displayattributeinternationalizationlocalization

I use a custom resource provider to get resource strings from a database. This works fine with ASP.NET where I can define the resource type as a string. The metadata attributes for model properties in MVC 3 (like [Range], [Display], [Required] require the type of a Resource as a parameter, where the ResourceType is the type of the generated code-behind class of a .resx file.

    [Display(Name = "Phone", ResourceType = typeof(MyResources))]
    public string Phone { get; set; }

Because I don't have .resx files, such a class does not exist. How can I use the model attributes with a custom resource provider?

I would like to have something like this:

    [Display(Name = "Telefon", ResourceTypeName = "MyResources")]
    public string Phone { get; set; }

The DisplayNameAttribute from System.ComponentModel had a overridable DisplayName Property for this purpose, but the DisplayAttribute class is sealed. For the validation attributes no corresponding classes exist.

Best Answer

The most cleanest way I came up with is to override DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider. Here's a very neat article on how to do this.

http://buildstarted.com/2010/09/14/creating-your-own-modelmetadataprovider-to-handle-custom-attributes/

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to create a dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common