DateTime format and decimal or currency issue resoved using Custom model binders in MVC

Hi all,

You can't keep yourself away from writing blog when you have faced an issue while development and you tried to solve it and finally you come across something interesting which finally resolved the issue

Today's post is regarding the scenario which we face in day to day life (But i faced it for the first time today) where i had multilingual application running on telerik controls

One of the page had DateTimePicker,We have "da-DK" (Danish) clients,When tried to save Date from one page,The page kept on giving error message "DateTime format is not valid" for this field (Typical MVC datetime validation error messgae)

So scenario was in UI everything was coming as per culture,If i select date from DatePicker it was returning correct format,But still couldn't figure out what was wrong

So let me cut the story short and tell you,Model binder was the key to success

The code looks like following

public class DateTimeModelBinder : IModelBinder
{
  public object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
  {
            ValueProviderResult valueResult = bindingContext.ValueProvider.GetValue(bindingContext.ModelName);
            ModelState modelState = new ModelState { Value = valueResult };
            object actualValue = null;
            try
            {
                string culture = Convert.ToString(HttpContext.Current.Session["culture"]);
                Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(culture);
                Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo(culture);
                actualValue = Convert.ToDateTime(valueResult.AttemptedValue, Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture);
            }
            catch (FormatException e)
            {
                modelState.Errors.Add(e);
            }

            bindingContext.ModelState.Add(bindingContext.ModelName, modelState);
            return actualValue;
  }
}

Above is simple class created under folder "Helper",Now what it does is it tells compiler that which format the date should be parsed so that its valid on server

Now,We are not done yet,We need to register this binders in global.asax file on Application_Start so that at runtime this class gets called and later on can parse the date as per culture,Which is like below

protected void Application_Start()
{
     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
           
      ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(DateTime), new DateTimeModelBinder());
     WebAssetDefaultSettings.UseTelerikContentDeliveryNetwork = true;
}

Now,Try to submit the date which previously you were trying to in different culture and all will work,Same applies for currency,You can use Convert.Deciaml() instead of Convert.DateTime

Cheers!!!