I have a couple of list items in a shared _layout.cshtm
file (master page) in my MVC application.
something like:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>about</li>
<li>contact</li>
<li>blog</li>
</ul>
when the user is in a homepage, I want home li
item to have class selected
, like so:
<li class="selected">Home</li>
and so on. What is the best way to do this?
In regular asp.net website, I used to have a method in master page and call that method from child page but in MVC I am not sure what to do.
thanks.
You could write a custom helper method:
public static MvcHtmlString MenuItem(
this HtmlHelper htmlHelper,
string text,
string action,
string controller
)
{
var li = new TagBuilder("li");
var routeData = htmlHelper.ViewContext.RouteData;
var currentAction = routeData.GetRequiredString("action");
var currentController = routeData.GetRequiredString("controller");
if (string.Equals(currentAction, action, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) &&
string.Equals(currentController, controller, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
li.AddCssClass("selected");
}
li.SetInnerText(text);
return MvcHtmlString.Create(li.ToString());
}
and then:
<ul>
@Html.MenuItem("Home", "home", "home")
@Html.MenuItem("About", "about", "home")
@Html.MenuItem("Contact", "contact", "home")
@Html.MenuItem("Blog", "blog", "home")
</ul>
The helper check the current action and controller and if they match the one passed as arguments to the helper it appends the selected
CSS class to the li
.
Just wanted to share what i do:
I create folder App_Code
and add CustomHelpers.cshtml
. In it i create something like this:
@helper MainMenu(string SelectedItem) {
<ul class="MainMenu">
<li><a href="/home" @if (SelectedItem == "Home") { <text>class="Active"</text> }>Home</a></li>
<li><a href="/about" @if (SelectedItem == "About") { <text>class="Active"</text> }>About</a></li>
<li><a href="/foo" @if (SelectedItem == "Foo") { <text>class="Active"</text> }>Foo</a></li>
</ul>
}
Than in my MasterPage (_Layout.cshtml) i add this where i want my menu to apear:
@CustomHelpers.MainMenu(ViewBag.SelectedMenu)
And than in my view, just like i change my page title, i change my selected menu:
@{
ViewBag.Title = "Welcome to my homepage";
ViewBag.SelectedMenu = "Home";
}
Got my idea from this tutorial: www.asp.net/mvc/videos/mvc-3/mvc-3-razor-helpers