Question

I have a property which is set to required via data annotation. This works perfectly fine for the create form but I would like to make the property not required in the edit form. How can I go about doing that?

Answer 1

You can create seperate view models for create and edit views. You can keep the common properties in a common class and inherit those 2 view models from that common class.

public class CustomerViewModel
{      
  public string Name { set;get;}      
  public string Location { set;get;}      
}
public class CreateCustomer :CustomerViewModel
{
  [Required]
  public string LastJobTitle { set;get;}
}
public class EditCustomer :CustomerViewModel
{  
  public string LastJobTitle { set;get;}
}

And you can use these in your Action method like this

public ActionResult Create()
{
  var createVM=new CreateCustomer();
  return View(createVM);
}
public ActionResult Edit(int id)
{
  var editVM=new EditCustomer();
  var customerModel=repositary.GetCustomer(id);
  editVM.LastJobTitle=customerModel.LastJobTitle;
  //set other properties also
  return View(createVM);
}

So your create view will be strongly typed to CreateCustomer class and edit view will be strongly typed to EditCustomer class.

Create.cshtml

@model CreateCustomer

Edit.cshtml

@model EditCustomer