Question

Suppose I have the view models below.

public class CustomerListViewModel {
  public IEnumerable<CustomerViewModel> Customers { get; set; }
}

public class CustomerViewModel {
  public string FirstName { get; set; }
  public string LastName { get; set; }
  public string Email { get; set; }
  public int Age { get; set; }
}

I want to display the list of Customers in my view inside a for-each loop. I also want to use DisplayFor to show the values with conventions applied (as opposed to just outputting the property as-is: customer.Age). With ASP.NET MVC, I used to just ignore the lambda variable in my expression (as was similarly discovered by the asker of this question).

<% foreach (var customer in Model.Customers) { %>
  ...
  <li><%: this.DisplayFor(m => customer.Age) %></li>
<% } %>

However, I get an error with FubuMVC if I do this.

Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Reflection.RtFieldInfo’ to type
‘System.Reflection.PropertyInfo’.

Must I use a partial to render each customer with DisplayFor appropriately?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In this particular use of display for:

<%: this.DisplayFor(m => customer.Age) %>

The overload is looking for an Expression that refers to a member of m. The use of “customer” here is what is causing the reflection exception.

There is an additional overload here: https://github.com/DarthFubuMVC/fubumvc/blob/master/src/FubuMVC.Core/UI/FubuPageExtensions.cs#L229

This one lets you explicitly specify the model type and instance:

<%: this.DisplayFor<Customer>(customer, c => c.Age) %>