MVC: Access display name attribute in the controller

Question

Is it possible to access the display name of a parameter in the controller? for example, say I defined a parameter as

public class Class1
{
  [DisplayName("First Name")]
  public string firstname { get; set; }
}

I now want to be able to access the display name of firstname in my controller. Something like

string name = Model.Class1.firstName.getDisplayName();

Is there a method like getDisplayName() that I can use to get the display name?

Answer 1

First off, you need to get a MemberInfo object that represents that property. You will need to do some form of reflection:

MemberInfo property = typeof(Class1).GetProperty("Name");

(I'm using "old-style" reflection, but you can also use an expression tree if you have access to the type at compile-time)

Then you can fetch the attribute and obtain the value of the DisplayName property:

var attribute = property.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DisplayNameAttribute), true)
      .Cast<DisplayNameAttribute>().Single();
string displayName = attribute.DisplayName;

Answer 2

Found the answer at this link. I created an Html helper class, added its namespace to my view web.config and used it in my controller. All described in the link