Question

In Ruby on Rails, there’s a YAML file in the configuration that lets you define plain-English versions of your model property names. Actually, it lets you define plain-any-language versions: it’s part of the internationalization stuff, but most people use it for things like displaying model validation results to the user.

I need that kind of functionality in my .NET MVC 4 project. The user submits a form and gets an email of pretty much everything they posted (the form gets bound to a model). I wrote a helper method to dump out an HTML table of property/value pairs by reflection, e.g.

foreach (PropertyInfo info in obj.GetType()
    .GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public | 
                   BindingFlags.Instance | 
                   BindingFlags.IgnoreCase)) 
{
  if (info.CanRead && !PropertyNamesToExclude.Contains(info.Name)) 
  {
    string value = info.GetValue(obj, null) != null ? 
                                            info.GetValue(obj, null).ToString() :
                                            null;
    html += "<tr><th>" + info.Name + "</th><td>" + value + "</td></tr>";
  }
}

But of course, this prints out info.Name‘s like “OrdererGid”, when maybe “Orderer Username” would be nicer. Is there anything like this in .NET?

Answer 1

There is a data attribute called DisplayName which allows you to do this. Just annotate your model properties with this and a friendly name for each

[DisplayName("Full name")]
public string FullName { get; set; }