I’m in the beautiful country of Brazil right now (I’ll hopefully blog more about that later) proctoring for the hands-on labs that’s part of the Web Camps agenda.
However, the folks here are keeping me on my toes asking me to give impromptu and deeply advanced demos. It almost feels like a form of performance art as I create brand new demos on the fly. 
During this time, several people reported issues binding to a decimal value that prompted me to write a new demo and this blog post.
Let’s look at the scenario. Suppose you have the following class (Jogador is a soccer player in Portugese):
public class Jogador {
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public decimal Salary { get; set; }
}
And you have two controller actions, one that renders a form used to create a Jogador and another action method that receives the POST request.
public ActionResult Create() {
// Code inside here is not important
return View();
}
public ActionResult Create(Jogador player) {
// Code inside here is not important
return View();
}
When you type in a value such as 1234567.55 into the Salary field and try to post it, it works fine. But typically, you would want to type it like 1,234,567.55 (or here in Brazil, you would type it as 1.234.567,55).
In that case, the DefaultModelBinder chokes on the value. This is unfortunate because jQuery Validate allows that value just fine. I’ll talk to the rest of my team about whether we should fix this in the next version of ASP.NET MVC, but for now it’s good to know there’s a workaround.
In general, we recommend folks don’t write custom model binders because they’re difficult to get right and they’re rarely needed. The issue I’m discussing in this post might be one of those cases where it’s warranted.
Here’s the code for my DecimalModelBinder. I should probably write one for other decimal types too, but I’m lazy.
WARNING: This is sample code! I haven’t tried to optimize it or test all scenarios. I know it works for direct decimal arguments to action methods as well as decimal properties when binding to complex objects.
using System;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Web.Mvc;
public class DecimalModelBinder : IModelBinder {
public object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext,
ModelBindingContext bindingContext) {
ValueProviderResult valueResult = bindingContext.ValueProvider
.GetValue(bindingContext.ModelName);
ModelState modelState = new ModelState { Value = valueResult };
object actualValue = null;
try {
actualValue = Convert.ToDecimal(valueResult.AttemptedValue,
CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
}
catch (FormatException e) {
modelState.Errors.Add(e);
}
bindingContext.ModelState.Add(bindingContext.ModelName, modelState);
return actualValue;
}
}
With this in place, you can easily register this in Application_Start within Global.asax.cs.
protected void Application_Start() {
AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(decimal), new DecimalModelBinder());
// All that other stuff you usually put in here...
}
That registers our model binder to only be applied to decimal types, which is good since we wouldn’t want model binding to try and use this model binder when binding any other type.
With this in place, the Salary field will now accept both 1234567.55 and 1,234,567.55.
Hope you find this useful. I’ve had a great time in Buenos Aires, Argentina and São Paulo, Brazil. I’ll probably be swamped when I get back home, but I’ll try to make time to write about my time here.