How do I display and check a Null value in MVC?

Question

I have an Object, say Employee with the following:

 Employee() { int id; string name; }

In my view,

I currently do

<input type="text" name="employeeName" id="employeeName" readonly="true" value="@Model.Employee.name"/>

However, in certain cases the Employee value will be null and this will give me an error, null reference error. Should I do inline checks to return an empty string if it's null or is there a better way?

would the @HTML.TextboxFor() method work better in this case?

Why would you manually create a textbox with name="employeeName" which has no relationship to you model and will not be bound on post back (your model does not have a property named employeeName)? Use @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.name, new { readonly = "readonly" }) — user3559349
– user3559349, Commented May 19, 2015 at 1:08
Oh I just made the above up on the fly. But it served as an example. — SamIAm
– SamIAm, Commented May 19, 2015 at 1:29
You using MVC so make use of its features. Always use strongly typed helpers to bind to your model properties :) — user3559349
– user3559349, Commented May 19, 2015 at 1:31
One additional point: you can also declaratively say how to display nulls: stackoverflow.com/a/17273132/49251. — DWright
– DWright, Commented May 19, 2015 at 1:45
@DWright, DisplayFormat.NullDisplayText is only respected by @Html.DisplayFor() (not by TextForFor() or EditorFor()) — user3559349
– user3559349, Commented May 19, 2015 at 2:17

ataravati · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-19 04:12:54Z

Using Html.TextBoxFor would handle this, yes:

@Html.TextBoxFor(i => i.Employee.Name)

This will not cause a null issue. You can also use your approach with null checks, so your assumption is correct:

<input type="text" name="employeeName" id="employeeName" readonly="true" value="@(Model.Employee != null ? Model.Employee.name : "")"/>

This is because you are using the objects directly, whereas TextBoxFor evaluates the expression tree and handles nulls appropriately.

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