asp.net MVC DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplate naming convention

Question

I've got a couple of questions about the naming convention for the DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplates in MVC 2.

If for example I have a customer object with a child list of account how do I:

Create a display template for the list of accounts, what is the file called?
When I'm doing a foreach( var c in Model.Accounts ) how do I call a display temple while in the foreach loop? When I do Html.DisplayFor( x => x ) inside the foreach x is the model and not in this case c.

Thanks in advance.

score 13 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 07 '11 at 22:58

13

Yeah, this is one of my favorite features, but it's a bit confusing for some things.

So, creating a template for any class, the name is based on the type's Name property, so for example if you do a <%= model.GetType().Name %> in your view, you can see what I mean. As an example, if your list of accounts is an IList, then the call to .Name on the type would return List`1. That's a legal file name, so if you put List`1.ascx in your DisplayTemplates folder, it'll find it and use it. from what I can tell, it won't traverse the class hierarchy, though, so for example if you put an IEnumerable`1.ascx file in there, it won't find it.

To display in a loop, you need to pass in the item variable into the lambda, so in your example:

<% foreach (var c in Accounts){ %>
      <li><%= Html.DisplayFor(x => c) %></li>
<%}%>

Hope that helps. Paul

edited Jan 07 '11 at 22:58

G-Wiz

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answered Feb 24 '10 at 15:55

Paul

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Thanks for the answer works fantastic. Just another question if I have two separate objects with different child lists say accounts and people both will have the object name List`1 how do you differentiate between the two? Or do you have to use UIHint attributes? – lancscoder Feb 24 '10 at 16:17
yep, both will have the same. I think the UIHint will work (haven't tried) but what you can also do is have the list template be generic (say, based on IEnumerable, non-generic) and then have it call DisplayFor inside *its* list, and then the list items will each have their properly typed template. You can also, iirc, pass in an explicit template name as a string in one of the overloads. – Paul Feb 24 '10 at 16:24
(Edited to fix literal backtick in Markdown syntax.) – G-Wiz Jan 07 '11 at 22:59
`This answer is out of date` Please look at other answers or update this one to include the new way (easier and more concise)! Thanks – Piotr Kula Oct 15 '13 at 10:32

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 15 '11 at 21:51

13

I realize this question is a bit old, but at least in MVC 3 when you want to have a custom display/edit template using a list you can pass in the name of the template:

Html.DisplayFor(model => model.Account, "AccountList")

then the name of your template would be "AccountList".

answered Feb 15 '11 at 21:51

sirchristian

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Much much much better than the accepted answer. Obviously at the time of answering it was relevant but the point of SO is update old answers or upvote newer answers like yours. Thanks. – Piotr Kula Oct 15 '13 at 10:31

score 11 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 11 '10 at 12:49

Brad Wilsons blog here http://bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/aspnet-mvc-2-templates-part-4-custom-object-templates.html has an example about DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplates for Custom Objects, and it discusses issues which may be helpful in resolving your question.

Regarding your first question, it is important that your template resides in a folder which the system looks for matching names in, e.g.

 ~/Views/ControllerName/DisplayTemplates/TemplateName.aspx & .ascx
 ~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/TemplateName.aspx & .ascx

(Replace DisplayTemplates with EditorTemplates for the search paths for editor templates.)

The following template names are tried in order:

TemplateHint from ModelMetadata
DataTypeName from ModelMetadata
The name of the type (see notes below)
If the object is not complex: “String”
If the object is complex and an interface: “Object”
If the object is complex and not an interface: Recurse through the inheritance hiearchy for the type, trying every type name

I'm not sure about an answer for your second question. Is it right to assume that var c is actually effectively Account c? And when you are writing Html.DisplayFor(x => x) you might as well be writing Html.DisplayModelFor(c => c) ? Or do you want to have `Html.DisplayFor(x => x.AccountName), for instance?

Hi, thanks for the link it doesn't quite answer all my questions though. Say for example I have a Customer with a Child List of Orders. At the moment if I want to show a list of orders I've created a partial view of IEnumberable and loop around each object creating a table. If I wanted to use this I would say something link Html.RenderPartial("OrdersTable",Model.Orders) but instead of using this I would like to say Html.DisplayFor( x => x.Orders) and it finds a display template but I dont know what to call the display template for a list. — lancscoder, Feb 24 '10 at 14:19
I've been banging my head against this one for a while. I didn't realise that the search paths were important. Will edit your post to make this clear. — Dead account, Jun 11 '10 at 12:45

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 28 '11 at 13:02

When setting up an MVC 3 application, the foreign keys that should allow drop down lists to select an item do not get rendered as drop downs, but as static inputs. This can be resolved by creating a custom display and view for that field. We will need to start by creating a custom partial view that will live in “~/Views/Shared/DisplayTemplates/UserGuid.cshtml”, and “~/Views/Shared/EditTemplates/UserGuid.cshtml”. The code for one is located below:

@model Guid

@{ 
    incMvcSite.Models.MvcSiteDB db = new incMvcSite.Models.MvcSiteDB();
    incMvcSite.Models.SecUser usr = db.SecUsers.Single(u => u.Guid == Model);
}
@usr.Display

This is a display for template that will look up the item in the referenced table and display it. We also need an edit for template as follows:

@model Guid
@{ 
    incMvcSite.Models.MvcSiteDB db = new incMvcSite.Models.MvcSiteDB();
    SelectList items = new SelectList(db.SecUsers.OrderBy(i => i.Display).ToList(), "Guid", "Display", Model);
}
@Html.DropDownList("", items)

The edit for template is implemented as a drop down list. Originally, we has used static HTML code, but the problem will appear of implementing a “prefix”. Static HTML code does get handled by HTML helpers, so it’s recommended that you use the HTML.DropDownList(). To force the MVC framework to use the new Display and Edit for templates, we need to annote our model item an add the following line: [UIHint("UserGuid")]

This will cause MVC to use the Display and Edit templates named “UserGuid”, which are just partial views.

score -1 · Answer 5 · answered Jul 07 '14 at 13:08

Not sure in previous versions but in MVC5 you can use UIHint to specify which custom display/editor template to use in the model like so,

[UIHint("CustomAccountList")] public List Accounts{ get; set; }

OR in the view like so

Html.DisplayFor(model => model.Accounts, "CustomAccountList")

asp.net MVC DisplayTemplates and EditorTemplate naming convention

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