Custom model binder for a property

Question

I have the following controller action:

[HttpPost]
public ViewResult DoSomething(MyModel model)
{
    // do something
    return View();
}

Answer 1

It has been 6 years since this question was asked, I would rather take this space to summarize the update, instead of providing a brand new solution. At the time of writing, MVC 5 has been around for quite a while, and ASP.NET Core has just come out.

I followed the approach examined in the post written by Vijaya Anand (btw, thanks to Vijaya): http://www.prideparrot.com/blog/archive/2012/6/customizing_property_binding_through_attributes. And one thing worth noting is that, the data binding logic is placed in the custom attribute class, which is the BindProperty method of the StringArrayPropertyBindAttribute class in Vijaya Anand's example.

However, in all the other articles on this topic that I have read (including @jonathanconway's solution), custom attribute class is only a step stone that leads the framework to find out the correct custom model binder to apply; and the binding logic is placed in that custom model binder, which is usually an IModelBinder object.

The 1st approach is simpler to me. There may be some shortcomings of the 1st approach, that I haven't known yet, though, coz I am pretty new to MVC framework at the moment.

In addition, I found that the ExtendedModelBinder class in Vijaya Anand's example is unnecessary in MVC 5. It seems that the DefaultModelBinder class which comes with MVC 5 is smart enough to cooperate with custom model binding attributes.