MVC 4 Data Annotations “Display” Attribute

Question

I am starting out with MVC 4 (Razor view engine). (I believe this may apply to MVC 3 and earlier as well.) I am wondering if there is any benefit to using the DisplayAttribute d

Answer 1

In addition to the other answers, there is a big benefit to using the DisplayAttribute when you want to localize the fields. You can lookup the name in a localization database using the DisplayAttribute and it will use whatever translation you wish.

Also, you can let MVC generate the templates for you by using Html.EditorForModel() and it will generate the correct label for you.

Ultimately, it's up to you. But the MVC is very "Model-centric", which is why data attributes are applied to models, so that metadata exists in a single place. It's not like it's a huge amount of extra typing you have to do.