I've got a View where I use a naming-convention on my text-fields, to indicate what should be done with the content once it is posted back to my controller.
The format is similar to:
<input type="text" name="RegistrationLine#ID" />
for updates
<input type="text" name="CreateRegistrationLine#LineNumber" /> for create
Now since I'm using this Naming-convention, regular model-binding isn't possible. But I've been reading up a bit on the subject and did find a bit of an indication that it would be possible to write a custom model binder, that should be able to help parse and bind these form elements and instantiate the objects correctly.
Please read: Bind formValue to property of different name, ASP.NET MVC
This is a bit similar to what I am doing except, I have the additional complexity of having appended information in the formelement-name that I am trying to bind to.
Am I way off base here? and if not, can any of you drop a few lines of code to show how you would start this model-binder off..
If this is a very bad approach to what I am really trying to achieve, I would love to hear suggestions for better approaches. Just note that what I want to be able to do is post back both updates and creates in one go.
I kinda have to agree with @jfar and @omar. I don't think a custom model binder is where you want to be in this instance.
You can pass a complex type to your view and simply use the full stop like @jfar mentioned.
id="Model.Person.Name.FirstName" will happily bind to an object named Person that has a class in it called Name that has a property called FirstName.
Now if you want to do some special checks on the data you could implement a partial class which would do the validations etc and populate the ModelState errors.
public partial class Name
{
public void Validate(){ }
public int CreateRegistrationLine(){ }
public bool DoSpecialActions(){ }
}
It's a little unclear what your special actions are doing so my example above may not be what you want.