Question

I have an MVC 3 website where I display dates in forms using:

<div class="editor-label control-label">
     @Html.LabelFor(m => m.rrsfWoman.DateOfBirth)
</div>
<div class="editor-field controls">
     @Html.EditorFor(m => m.rrsfWoman.DateOfBirth)
     @Html.ValidationMessageFor(m => m.rrsfWoman.DateOfBirth)
</div>

The date of birth is defined in the rrsfWoman class as

public DateTime WomansDateOfBirth { get; set; }

My problem is that as the date of birth field has by default a value of MinDate. Is there a way I can supress the display of the date as 1/01/0001 without making the field nullable.

Thanks

Answer 1

Is there a way I can supress the display of the date as 1/01/0001
without making the field nullable.

The correct way to achieve that is to make the date nullable in your view model. If you don’t do that later you will struggle with model binding as well because a non-nullable DateTime field cannot be bound to an empty string and you will have to write custom model binders and stuff to make it work. You will make your life miserable if you don’t use view models.

This being said, if you want to go against good practices, you could define a custom editor template for the DateTime type that will perform the check and use an empty value but honestly I don’t recommend you doing that:

~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/DateTime.cshtml:

@model DateTime

@if (Model == default(DateTime))
{
    @Html.TextBox("", "")
}
else
{
    @Html.TextBox("", ViewData.TemplateInfo.FormattedModelValue)
}