I have a project work work with hundreds of grids. On one grid in particular, the original designer created a view and added it as a nested model inside our driver model. This is a problem because Kendo seems to not be able to detect the field type of a field nested this way. When it can't, it assumes the field is a string.
In my particular case, I have two fields that contain dates that we want to filter on, but the date filtering is broken because of this.
I was able to find numerous examples of specifying it in the data source, but only for jquery grids (one example: https://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/knowledge-base/use-nested-model-properties ). I can't convert this to mvc because the methods aren't lining up.
Any idea on how to do this in mvc? Note: I also tried just changing the UI on the filter to date and that didn't work either. I got a stack trace claiming date needed to be a string.
Unfortunately, according to Telerik , the fact is that you simply can't do what I was trying to do. The solution is to flatten the model. I pulled the questionable fields into notmapped fields in the master model. The relevant part of their response:
In MVC the nested properties are properties to another Model. As the Telerik UI Grid needs a flat structure of data, the nested properties could be shown with the help of a ClientTemplate, but they will always be string typed. In order to achieve the desired behavior, I would recommend making the pointed Date fields - part of the Main Model and using them as flat data out of the box.
The caveat here is you can't filter a linq-for-queries datasource to a notmapped field because it doesn't exist in it but in my case, a .toList() didn't cause any performance problems because the dataset was small, with only a few hundred records. However, you can edit the incoming DatasourceRequest object to modify the filters and sorts to point at the sub model, after your controller read is hit.