Question

I’ve got some entities which have decimal properties on them. These entities’ properties are displayed in multiple places throughout my UI.

Currently I’m finding myself doing:

litWeight.Text = person.Weight.ToString('0.00'); 

all over the place. Now I know for a fact that in several instances, and am suspicious of many others that the client is likely to want the values to 3d.p. in the future.

Is there some pattern I can employ to handle the formatting of this Weight property (and other properties; not just decimals, perhaps dates etc.) so that I can have this formatting in a single place?

I know could use a formatstring in the webconfig, or write some extension methods in the UI but these don’t seem very elegant solutions.

It would be nice to have some formatting objects which are tied to my entities, so its inherently obvious which formatter to use.

Thanks,

Andrew

Answer 1

The simplest solution would be to make a utility class with static methods that appropriately format different types of values and call them. For example:

litWeight.Text = Utility.FormatWeight(person.Weight);