ASP.NET MVC optional field being treated as required

Question

I have this field that for some reason when I click on submit, gets a validation message that the field is required.

[DisplayName(\"Total Budget:\")]
public          


        

Answer 1

The built-in DefaultModelBinder in MVC will perform required and data type validation on value types like int, DateTime, decimal, etc. This will happen even if you don't explicitly specify validation using someting like [Required].

In order to make this optional, you will have to define it as nullable:

public double? Budget { get; set; }