Question

I am trying to use metadata to further define my entity objects using MVC2, LINQ to SQL, and VB.NET. Here are the two main pieces of code in question:

<HiddenInput(DisplayValue:=False)> _
    <Column(IsPrimaryKey:=True, IsDbGenerated:=True, AutoSync:=AutoSync.OnInsert)> _
    Public Property ItemID As Integer
        Get
            Return _itemID
        End Get
        Set(value As Integer)
            _itemID = value
        End Set
    End Property

        <DataType(DataType.MultilineText)> _
    <Column()> _
    Public Property Description As String
        Get
            Return _description
        End Get
        Set(value As String)
            _description = value
        End Set
    End Property

Here’s the code for my view:

<div class="editor-label">
            <%: Html.LabelFor(Function(model) model.ItemID) %>
        </div>
        <div class="editor-field">
            <%: Html.TextBoxFor(Function(model) model.ItemID) %>
            <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(Function(model) model.ItemID) %>
        </div>

 <div class="editor-label">
            <%: Html.LabelFor(Function(model) model.Description) %>
        </div>
        <div class="editor-field">
            <%: Html.TextBoxFor(Function(model) model.Description) %>
            <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(Function(model) model.Description) %>
        </div>

For the first example, my Create View is supposed to render the input tag ‘hidden’ in the resulting html. In the second example, my Create View is supposed to render a larger input text field for description, because of the metadata and the metadata, respectively. However, neither occurs.

The first thing that comes to mine is that maybe I am defining metadata in VB.NET syntactically inappropriately. All of my examples of defining metadata are in C#… I can find absolutely zero examples in VB.NET. Please help.

Answer 1

Html.TextBoxFor() always renders a visible text box. Hence the name. 🙂

To have a different kind of editor based on the attributes, use Html.EditorFor() instead.