Should I have both text and value in my model for a property that is selected from dropdownlist - asp.net-mvc-4

Question

In ASP.NET MVC application I have a model named CarSearchCriteria:
public class CarSearchCriteria{
public int CarMake {get;set;} // This is selected from a dropdownlist
public int YearOfFirstReg {get;set;}
public string ModelVariant {get;set}
}
I have two views - one for editing and the other one for viewing. In the editing view for the CarMake property I can do the following. I know I could have used DropDownListFor but didn't want to mess with SelectList for the time being:
<select name="CarMake">
<option value="1">BMW</option>
<option value="2">Mercedes</option>
<option value="3">Toyota</option>
</select>
So the model binding mechanism will easily bind the selected value to the appropriate model property. But what about the reading mode. I can't show 1s or 2s. I need to show BMW, Mercedes and so on. My question is what is the preferred way, do I have to have a property name that holds the actual textual information, something like CarMakeText?

Answer 1

You could have both the identifier (which you currently have) as well as the Make object itself. The latter would never need to be accessed when building the model, but can be accessed when reading the model. A lazy-loaded read-only property often works well for that. Something like this:
public int CarMakeID { get; set; }
public Make CarMake
{
get
{
if (CarMakeID == default(int))
return null;
// fetch the Make from data and return it
}
}
Naturally, this depends a lot on what a Make actually is and where you get it. If there's just some in-memory list somewhere then that should work fine. If fetching an instance of a Make is a little more of an operation (say, fetching from a database) then maybe some in-object caching would be in order in case you need to access it more than once:
public int CarMakeID { get; set; }
private Make _carMake;
public Make CarMake
{
get
{
if (CarMakeID == default(int))
return null;
if (_carMake == null)
// fetch the Make from data and save it to _carMake
return _carMake;
}
}

Answer 2

David's solution is just fine but for some reason I find my own solution to better fit my needs and besides that I find it more elegant. So basically what I do is I create a class that holds the textual descriptions of all the properties that keep just ID. For example, I have the following model:
public class EmployeeModel{
public int EmployeeID {get;set;}
public string FullName {get;set}
*public int DepartmentID {get;set}
*public int SpecialityID {get;set;}
public int Age {get;set;}
}
The properties marked with asterisk are the properties that keep ids of possible many predefined options and when showing we're supposed to show the actual descriptions, not the number representations. So for this purpose, we create a separate class:
public class EmployeeTextValues{
public string DepartmentName {get;set;}
public string SpecialityName {get;set;}
}
And then I just add this class as a property to my model:
public EmployeeTextValues TextValues {get;set;}
After that, it's quite easy to access it from anywhere, including Razor.
P.S. I'm sure that a lot of people will tend to do the following before initializing this property:
Employee emp=new Employee;
emp.Age=25;
emp.TextValues.DepartmentName="Engineering";// Don't do this
If you try to access or set Textvalues.Someproperty you'll get Object reference not set to an instance of an object. So do not forget to set TextValues first to some initialized object. Just a kind reminder, that's all.