Question

I have a regular form that gets POSTed to a controller. Dates must be entered in the day/month/year format, since it’s an app for South America. I’m force setting the current culture UI to spanish-Peru. Tried with MVC 3 and 4 beta.

Here is the controller Code:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(EditPatientViewModel model)
{
   Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("es-PE");
   if (ModelState.IsValid) {
       // never reaches in here if date submitted as day/month/year
   }
}

When I debug and look at the ModelState errors, the culture inside of them is still set to en-US, even though I can verify the CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture is set to es-PE.

How do I make the ModelState validation also change?

Answer 1

Set the globalization in your web.config to es-PE.

<configuration>
   <system.web>
      <globalization fileEncoding="utf-8" 
                     requestEncoding="utf-8" 
                     responseEncoding="utf-8" 
                     culture="es-PE"
                     uiCulture="es-PE"/>
   </system.web>
</configuration>

And it should work fine, posting and validation.

UPDATE

If for any reason your ModelState is interpreting your Date incorrect you can do something like:

ModelState[n].Value.Culture = {es-PE};

before the validation occurs.

UPDATE

You can also change default binder and make your own.

public class MyDateTimeBinder : IModelBinder
{
  public object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
  {
     var value = bindingContext.ValueProvider.GetValue(bindingContext.ModelName);
     var date = value.ConvertTo(typeof(DateTime), CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
      return date;    
   }
}

Put

ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(DateTime), new MyDateTimeBinder());
ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(DateTime?), new MyDateTimeBinder());

in the Application_Start() in the Global.asax.

Regards.