Question

I’m not sure if this is possible, or if it is an acceptable/unacceptable practice, but I have an int property (Gender) on my Person object, and I’m wondering if there is a way that I could display text (and radio buttons, assuming those are the best option) for the user to select (i.e. “male” and “female”), rather than displaying it as numbers. I’m assuming it is possible, but I don’t know where to start. Would it be some customization directly on the property, maybe in the service layer? I have some customization with “Format” and “Caption” on other properties there. Here’s all I have for Gender:

properties.Add(new PropertyData { Property = "Gender", Type = "Int32", Value = data.Gender.ToString() });

Or would it be directly in the view? This is what I have right now – just a text box where you can type an integer.

<p class="span1">
    @Html.Label(Model.Person.Properties, "Gender")
    @Html.TextBox(Model.Person.Properties, "Gender")
    @Html.Tip(Model.Person.Properties, "Gender")
</p>

Any help is appreciated. 🙂 Please let me know if I need to supply any additional information or code.

EDIT:
I used the following:

<p>
    @Html.Label(Model.Person.Properties, "Gender")
    <input type="radio" name="Gender" value="1" /><span>Male</span>
    <input type="radio" name="Gender" value="2" /><span>Female</span>
</p>

Is there a way to keep the button selected when I pull up my Person to edit? Everything else (i.e. current data for the record) repopulates on the Edit form. (Should this be a separate question?)

Answer 1

Take a look at this post and see if it helps: How to pass an enum to Html.RadioButtonFor to get a list of radio buttons in MVC 2 RC 2, C#

In short

1. Create a gender enum
2. Use a method to read the gender name
   from the enum
3. Set the value of the radio button to
   the value of the enum