How to Use @Html.EditorFor() without the view model

Question

I want to do something like this so I can create a modal dialog that I'll invoke late with jQuery ``` ``` On this line ``` @Html.EditorFor(model => new ViewModel(), "ViewModelTemplateName") ``` I get the error Templates can be used only with field access, property access, single-dimension array index, or single-parameter custom indexer expressions. I don't understand why it would care where or what the instance is (as long as its the right type) @Ht…

Accepted Answer

Technically it's not the instance that's the problem. It's an expression, not a function, that you're passing there and the expression parser used by `EditorFor`, to get the meta data it uses to identify the properties etc, doesn't support `new` expressions.

You can simply declare a new instance of the model outside of the EditorFor statement and do this:

```
@{ var emptyViewModel = new ViewModel(); }
@Html.EditorFor(model => emptyViewModel, "ViewModelTemplateName") 
```

That should work.

That said - not using part of the `model` in the expression is a little weird. You should perhaps consider extracting the dialog out to it's own partial view that has `ViewModel` as it's model type, and then you can use `EditorForModel` in that, and call it from this parent view using a `new ViewModel()` as the model you pass to it.

How to Use @Html.EditorFor() without the view model

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