How to get the field name for a model property

I’m working on a custom EditorTemplate for a FunnelWeb around the new tagging system that I’m working on.

It’s quite a complex editor that I’m doing, and it’s being bound against a collection, an IEnumerable<T> in fact. But I have a problem, I need to be able to find out the Name that would be generated for the model property.

If you do something like:

@Html.EditorFor(x => x.StringProperty)

You will get an input like this:

<input type="text" name="StringProperty" />

But I need the Name, how do you do it?

The other week when I was browsing through the Orchard source I came across this gem, and I knew one day I was going to need to do it, but you can get it from the ViewData of the HtmlHelper instance, just like this:

@Html.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(string partialFieldName)

Here’s the MSDN doco if you’re interested in reading it. But that’s not really useful, you need to pass a string in, that’s not really useful, I’ve got a Model property to work with, well you can nicely convert a Lambda expression, using the ExpressionHelper class (link).

Here’s an extension method which will do what I need:

    public static string FieldNameFor<T, TResult>(this HtmlHelper<T> html, Expression<Func<T, TResult>> expression) {
        return html.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(expression));
    }

I got the source from the Orchard project, you can find it here.

Now you can easily get the Name for any property.