How to make date visible in Chrome native datepicker while it binds from Model in MVC4

Introduction

When we want to bind a date field from Model to View in MVC4 and try to see it in Chrome, it will not display the date while it works fine with Internet Explorer. So this tip will help you to resolve this problem.

Using the Code

Suppose you have a property StartDate in your model:

[DataType(DataType.Date)]
public DateTime StartDate 

Now if you have a view with the following code to edit StartDate and here I am using the Html.EditorFor helper class so this helper class by default generates the input field with type date.

<div class="editor-label">
    <%: Html.LabelFor(model => model.StartDate) %>
</div>
<div class="editor-field">
    <%: Html.EditorFor(model => model.StartDate) %>
    <%: Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.StartDate) %>
</div>

It will not show the date in Chrome as you can see in the screenshot.

The reason behind this is that when we add a property in the model with annotation [DataType( DataType.Date)], then ASP.NET MVC4 by default generates an input field with type="date" and Chrome has supported HTML5 so it will render as a date picker which is supported by the default format of date like "yyyy/mm/dd".

So we need to change the format of date in the model itself by giving the following annotation:

[DisplayFormat(ApplyFormatInEditMode = true, DataFormatString = "{0:yyyy-MM-dd}")] 

So finally, the model Property will look like:

[DisplayFormat(ApplyFormatInEditMode = true, DataFormatString = "{0:yyyy-MM-dd}")]
[DataType(DataType.Date)]
public DateTime StartDate
{
    get;
    set;
}

Points of Interest

I did a lot of experiments to find this solution. I know there are a lot of ways to achieve this, but I find this method most easy and fruitful, that's why I shared it with all.