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I've got a View where I use a naming-convention on my text-fields, to indicate what should be done with the content once it is posted back to my controller.

The format is similar to:

<input type="text" name="RegistrationLine#ID" /> for updates

<input type="text" name="CreateRegistrationLine#LineNumber" /> for create

Now since I'm using this Naming-convention, regular model-binding isn't possible. But I've been reading up a bit on the subject and did find a bit of an indication that it would be possible to write a custom model binder, that should be able to help parse and bind these form elements and instantiate the objects correctly.

Please read: Bind formValue to property of different name, ASP.NET MVC

This is a bit similar to what I am doing except, I have the additional complexity of having appended information in the formelement-name that I am trying to bind to.

Am I way off base here? and if not, can any of you drop a few lines of code to show how you would start this model-binder off..

If this is a very bad approach to what I am really trying to achieve, I would love to hear suggestions for better approaches. Just note that what I want to be able to do is post back both updates and creates in one go.

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    I have to ask "why?". If you replaced # with . you could take advantage of the default model binder and save yourself a lot of work. Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 2:44
  • Maybe the View Model Pattern will be the way to go in this case, as implementing a custom ModelBinder is not that simple, specially if you want it to do more that just bind. Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 3:17
  • @jfar: That's interesting. So that means I am missing some understanding of the default binder. Commented Dec 17, 2009 at 4:55

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I kinda have to agree with @jfar and @omar. I don't think a custom model binder is where you want to be in this instance.

You can pass a complex type to your view and simply use the full stop like @jfar mentioned.

id="Model.Person.Name.FirstName" will happily bind to an object named Person that has a class in it called Name that has a property called FirstName.

Now if you want to do some special checks on the data you could implement a partial class which would do the validations etc and populate the ModelState errors.

public partial class Name
{
  public void Validate(){ }
  public int CreateRegistrationLine(){ }
  public bool DoSpecialActions(){ }
}

It's a little unclear what your special actions are doing so my example above may not be what you want.

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