>Try the DisplayFormat attribute with NullDisplayText set to an empty string: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.componentmodel.dataannotations.displayformatattribute.aspx

Rob,

Google Chrome and FireFox display empty string when the value is null while IE 9 displays null and also for some reason doesn't display images for the buttons.

I found this answer http://stackoverflow.com/questions/476436/null-coalescing-operator-for-javascript but it's not exactly clear to me.

If I have a value =null and I want to replace it with an empy string, how will it behave? According to that answer, both null and empty string are the same in JavaScript.

I have this code

$('#Contact1').val($('.trSelected td:eq(3)').text());

and I am wondering if I should try

$('#Contact1').val(($('.trSelected td:eq(3)').text()||''));

BTW, this didn't work, since the value is already a string 'null' not the null. May be instead of text in the above I need to use val()