Can't use lambda with EmailBox

[Carl B]

Form doesn't get much simpler than this:

@model Events.ViewModels.FindMyRegistrationsViewModel

@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
@Html.AntiForgeryToken()
@this.EmailBox(x => x.Email).AutoLabel()
@Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.Email)
}

This form fails to load CS1660: Cannot convert lambda expression to
type 'string' because it is not a delegate type

I can do this:

@model Events.ViewModels.FindMyRegistrationsViewModel

@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
@Html.AntiForgeryToken()
@this.EmailBox("Email").AutoLabel() @Html.ValidationMessageFor(x =>
x.Email)
}

and it works fine, but I want strong types! (FWIW "Email" is a public
string { get; set; } in the ViewModel)

I obviously have MvcContrib.FluentHtml in my web.config or the latter
wouldn't work. I've gotta be missing something obvious, but searching
for this error seems to indicate a hundred different causes for a
hundred different scenarios, not all of which are MvcContrib related.

[Tim Scott]

Carl,

This is well covered by tests, and I tried it myself to double check.  No problem.

If you are correct that Email is a public read-write string property of view model T then the only other think of is that your view is not an IViewModelContainer<T>.  It should be our built-in ModelWebViewPage<T> (assuming Razor) or your own implementation.

Tim

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[Carl Bussema]

So the strongly typed helpers require a view (or a base view) to implement that interface or inherit that? I missed that in the docs, but will try it again tomorrow. I know I tried changing the page to

@Model ModelWebViewPage<FindMyRegistrationsViewModel> and it still didn't work.

[Carl Bussema]

Ah, for anyone else having this problem you have to use @inherits, not @model. Once I used @inherits ModelWebViewPage<MyViewModel> it worked as intended.

I would like to hear from the MVCcontrib team why they went with that approach and why everything is an extension method on IViewModelContainer instead of HtmlHelper... it's a little confusing switching back and forth between @this and @Html. Since I don't see a significant advantage for example, in using @this.ValidationMessage vs @Html.ValidationMessageFor, I'd rather stick with the official once, since it's well-documented and less prone to random change. It's not a huge deal, but it is confusing to someone used to programming in Razor to have to mentally shift gears half the time. 

Thanks,

Carl

[Tim Scott]

The simple answer is that FluentHtml predates HtmlHelper<T> by about 1.5 years.  Another answer is that we provide custom behaviors injected into the view that you can do a lot of cool stuff with.