ASP.NET MVC: Display Name attribute from Resources

Updated on March 24, 2019     Kisan Patel

Problem:

I have a localized application, and I am wondering if it is possible to have the Display Name for a certain model property set from a Resource.

Solution

Solution 1:
Here if you want to support many types of resources:

public class LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute : DisplayNameAttribute
{
    private readonly PropertyInfo nameProperty;

    public LocalizedDisplayNameAttribute(string displayNameKey, Type resourceType = null)
        : base(displayNameKey)
    {
        if (resourceType != null)
        {
            nameProperty = resourceType.GetProperty(base.DisplayName,
                                           BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public);
        }
    }

    public override string DisplayName
    {
        get
        {
            if (nameProperty == null)
            {
                return base.DisplayName;
            }
            return (string)nameProperty.GetValue(nameProperty.DeclaringType, null);
        }
    }
}

Then use it like this:

    [LocalizedDisplayName("Age", typeof(MyNameSpace.Resources.Form))]
    public string Age { get; set; }

Solution 2:

    // Before C# 6.0
    [Display(Name = "Age", ResourceType = typeof(Testi18n.Resource))]
    public string Age { get; set; }

    // After C# 6.0
    // [Display(Name = nameof(Resource.Age), ResourceType = typeof(Resource))]