MVC Razor need to get Substring

Question

I have the following inside of my view

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

I need to get the first initial of the First Name.

I tried

    @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.FirstName).Substring(1,1) 

but it does not seem to work. I get the following error: .. 'System.Web.Mvc.MvcHtmlString' does not contain a definition for 'Substring' and no extension

Answer 1

You could implement in view as follows:

@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => modelItem.FirstName).ToString().Substring(0,5)

Answer 2

Might I suggest that the view is not the right place to do this. You should probably have a separate model property, FirstInitial, that contains the logic. Your view should simply display this.

  public class Person
  {
       public string FirstName { get; set; }

       public string FirstInitial
       {
           get { return FirstName != null ? FirstName.Substring(0,1) : ""; }
       }

       ...
   }


   @Html.DisplayFor( modelItem => modelItem.FirstInitial )

Answer 3

You should put a property on your ViewModel for that instead of trying to get it in the view code. The views only responsibility is to display what is given to it by the model, it shouldn't be creating new data from the model.

Answer 4

You can use a custom extension method as shown below:

/// <summary>
/// Returns only the first n characters of a String.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="str"></param>
/// <param name="start"></param>
/// <param name="maxLength"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public static string TruncateString(this string str, int start, int maxLength)
{        
    return str.Substring(start, Math.Min(str.Length, maxLength));
}

Answer 5

This worked for me (no helper):

@item.Description.ToString().Substring(0, (item.Description.Length > 10) ? 10 : item.Description.Length )

Answer 6

This will truncate at 10 characters and add "..." to the end if it is longer than 13 characters.

@if (item.Notes.Length <= 13)
{
  @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.FirstName)
}
else
{
  @(item.FirstName.ToString().Substring(0, 10) + "...")
}

Answer 7

Two things I learned while trying to solve this problem which are key:

1. Razor allows C# which means the .Substring(0,1) method will work
2. (WHERE I WENT WRONG) - Be very careful that none of your item.FirstNames are empty or contain fewer characters than being requested as the string length.

My solution was the following:

string test = item.FirstName.ToString();
    string test_add = ""; //creating an empty variable
    if(test.Length == 0) //situation where we have an empty instance
    {
        test_add = "0"; //or whatever you'd like it to be when item.FirstName is empty
    }
    else
    {
        test_add = test.Substring(0, 1);
    }

and you can use @test_add in your razor code in place of @item.FirstName

Answer 8

If you are only wanting to display the first character of item.FirstName why not do:

@Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.FirstName.Substring(1,1))

You have it the wrong side of the closing bracket.