I use MVC4 with razor.
I ran into the problem of formating correctly a DateTime property of my model that I render in the view using a TextBoxFor MVC helper. The default formatting displays the full date with hours, minutes and seconds :
@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BeginDate)displays “27/04/2012 00:00:00” in the textbox. I only needed the first part so I wanted to use the ‘d’ format.
I then tried to use DataAnnotations to impose a format to the property to display:
[DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:d}")]
public DateTime BeginDate { get; set; }Still, the generated textbox has the full date displayed : “27/04/2012 00:00:00”
There are actually 2 solutions to that :
1- Use DataAnnotations + EditorFor
The dataannotation DisplayFormat is actually NOT taken into account when the data is rendered with @Html.TextBoxFor helper. It applies only to the EditorFor helper.
So, keeping your dataannotation and replacing your helper by this shoud work :
@Html.EditorFor(m => m.BeginDate)2 -Use TextBoxFor and alter the @Value parameter
If you really want your TextBoxFor, there is also a solution which I find less desirable since it tinkles with the default behavior of TextBoxFor.
You can remove the DisplayFormat data annotation and use this helper :
@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.BeginDate, new { @Value = Model.BeginDate.ToString("d") })
