I want to have custom Html.DateTimePickerFor(a => a.Fields[0].Id, value)
so the result should be like this:
<div name="Fields[0].Id"></div>
Currently I use Html.DatetimePicker("Fields[0].Id", value) and it works perfectly, but I wan to generate dynamic name.
So the question is how to set correct "name" attribute?
Try this. It works for me.
public static MvcHtmlString DateTimePickerFor<TModel, TProp>(this HtmlHelper<TModel> helper, Expression<Func<TModel, TProp>> expression, object htmlAttributes)
{
string name = ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(expression);
... rest of code here
}
The magic comes from System.Web.Mvc.ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(). Once you have the name from your expression, you can apply it to your div.
NameFor() does: 1) attribute encoding and 2) name qualification. See the MVC source, where the name is further qualified by calling: html.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(name)
NameExtensions class - After seeing your answer, I was curious how it differed from NameFor(). NameFor() calls GetExpressionText() and passes the result to an overload which returns MvcHtmlString.Create(html.AttributeEncode(html.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(name))); The attribute encoding probably isn't a big deal, but the name qualification can cause problems.Try something like this (adapted from working code):
public static IHtmlString DateTimePickerFor<TModel, TValue>(
this HtmlHelper<TModel> helper,
Expression<Func<TModel, TValue>> expression,
// other input parameters as needed
) {
// metadata gives you access to a variety of useful things, such as the
// display name and required status
var metadata = ModelMetadata.FromLambdaExpression( expression, helper.ViewData );
string markup = ""; // markup for your input
var name = helper.NameFor( expression ); // getting the name
return MvcHtmlString.Create( markup );
}
TextBoxForversion for DateTime fields or anEditFortemplate for a specific field? I think this is the most important factor at the moment.