ASP.Net MVC Razor Remove Time From DateTime Property

Question

I am developing an ASP.Net MVC 3 Web application using Razor Views. I have the following ViewModel which is passed to my Razor View and iterated through to display a list of records.

ViewModel

public class ViewModelLocumEmpList
{
    public IList<FormEmployment> LocumEmploymentList {get; set;}
}

View

<table>
  <tr>
   <th>Employer</th>
   <th>Date</th>
   </tr>
    @foreach (var item in Model.LocumEmploymentList) {
      <tr>
        <td>@item.employerName</td>
        <td>@item.startDate</td>
      </tr>
      }
      </table>

My problem is that the line

@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDate)

Returns a date like this 20/06/2012 00:00:00, and I would like it to remove the time and just display the date, ie, 20/06/2012.

I have tried adding

@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDate.Value.ToShortDateString())

And

DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDate.HasValue ? item.startDate.Value.ToShortDateString(): "")

However, they both return the following error message at runtime

Templates can be used only with field access, property access, single-dimension array index, or single-parameter custom indexer expressions.

I have looked at Darin Dimitrov’s answer here Converting DateTime format using razor

However, I don’t have access to the startDate property in my ViewModel, my ViewModel returns an IList of FormEmployment objects which you can see above.

If anyone has any idea’s on how to remove the time from the date time property then I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks.

Also, my startDate property is Nullable.

Update

Based on PinnyM's answer, I added a partial class (see below) to place the [DisplayFormat] attribute on the startDate property.

public partial class FormEmployment
{
    [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:dd/MM/yyyy}")]
    public Nullable<System.DateTime> startDate { get; set; }
}

However, my Razor View still displays 20/06/2012 00:00:00 using the following code

@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDate)

Any idea's?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use @item.startDate.Value.ToShortDateString() (adding the proper validation for null value)

Answer 2

You can use a DisplayFormat attribute on your model startDate property:

[DisplayFormat(DataFormatString="{0:dd/MM/yyyy}")]
public DateTime? startDate { get; set; }

The just use DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDate)

Another option is to create a read-only property just for the formatting:

public String startDateFormatted { get { return String.Format("{0:dd/MM/yyyy}", startDate); } }

And use DisplayFor(modelItem => item.startDateFormatted)

Answer 3

For me I was able to do something similar to the above answer, but using "Value" attribute kept giving errors.

<td>
@item.DOB.ToShortDateString()
</td>

Other things to note: I'm using ASP.Net Core MVC with the .NET 5 framework so not sure how that's classified or called these days.

Hope this helps someone else coming across this issue later in the future.