I searched but could not find any quick solutions for an MVC 3 htmlhelper to create a wrapper method. What I'm looking for is something like:
@html.createLink("caption", "url")
{
<html> content in tags </html>
}
the result should have
<a href="url" title="Caption">
<html> content in tags </html>
</a>
Any help with this.
The way that this is done with BeginForm is that the return type MvcForm
impliments IDisposable
so that when used within a using
statement, the Dispose
method of MvcForm
writes out the closing </form>
tag.
You can write an extension method that does exactly the same thing.
Here's one I just wrote to demonstrate.
First off, the extension method:
public static class ExtensionTest
{
public static MvcAnchor BeginLink(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper)
{
var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder("a");
htmlHelper.ViewContext.Writer
.Write(tagBuilder.ToString(
TagRenderMode.StartTag));
return new MvcAnchor(htmlHelper.ViewContext);
}
}
And here's our new type, MvcAnchor:
public class MvcAnchor : IDisposable
{
private readonly TextWriter _writer;
public MvcAnchor(ViewContext viewContext)
{
_writer = viewContext.Writer;
}
public void Dispose()
{
this._writer.Write("</a>");
}
}
In your views you can now do:
@{
using (Html.BeginLink())
{
@Html.Raw("Hello World")
}
}
Which yields the result:
<a>Hello World</a>
Expanding this slightly to deal with your exact requirement:
public static MvcAnchor BeginLink(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper,
string href,
string title)
{
var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder("a");
tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("href",href);
tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("title", title);
htmlHelper.ViewContext.Writer.Write(tagBuilder
.ToString(TagRenderMode.StartTag));
return new MvcAnchor(htmlHelper.ViewContext);
}
and our view:
@{
using (Html.BeginLink("http://stackoverflow.com", "The Worlds Best Q&A site"))
{
@Html.Raw("StackOverflow - Because we really do care")
}
}
which yields the result:
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" title="The Worlds Best Q&A site">
StackOverflow - Because we really do care</a>
There's also another way, without disposable trick. It's less work, great for small helpers. I answered similar question, and don't want to copy everything, but here's a short example:
@helper Paragraph(string cssClass, Func<object, object> markup) {
<p class="@cssClass">@markup.DynamicInvoke(this.ViewContext)</p>
}
Usage of this helper looks like this:
@Paragraph("highlited",
@<text>
Look, a @Html.ActionLink("link", "index")
</text>
)
My full answer to the other similar question here.
At its simplest level something like this would do it
public static MvcHtmlString SomeLink(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string href, string title, string content )
{
var urlHelper = ((Controller)htmlHelper.ViewContext.Controller).Url;
//var url = urlHelper.Action(actionName, controllerName, routeValues);
var someLink = new TagBuilder("a");
someLink.MergeAttribute("href", href);
someLink.InnerHtml = content;
return new MvcHtmlString(someLink.ToString());
}