dotnetable

When working in a Microsoft MVC application, creating forms containing form elements is made easier due to the number of available HtmlHelper methods for a TextBox, DropDownList, TextArea etc. Although HtmlHelpers are not only available for form controls, there are helpers for links, view rendering, validation and more built in to the MVC libraries.

At some point there will not be a HtmlHelper that does just what is needed and want to share a few examples of customer HtmlHelpers.

Example 1. Label Helper
This example generates html label page elements. Creating the label is as simple as building a string containing the html to be displayed on the page.

using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace HtmlHelpersDemo.Code
{
    public static class Helpers
    {
        public static MvcHtmlString Label(string labelText)
        {
            return new MvcHtmlString(string.Format("<label>{0}</label>", labelText));
        }

        public static MvcHtmlString Label(string labelText, string forAssociatdControl)
        {
            return new MvcHtmlString(string.Format("<label for='{0}'>{1}</label>", forAssociatdControl, labelText));
        }
    }
}

These methods return an instance of type MvcHtmlString class which represents an HTML-encoded string. MvcHtmlString is a member of System.Web.Mvc namespace (in System.Web.Mvc.dll).

Usage
To display a label we add a using statement at the beginning of our view.

@using HtmlHelpersDemo.Code;
@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Home Page";
}

@Helpers.Label("First Name:")

@Helpers.Label("Last Name:", "SomeControl")

When rendered the page contains the labels as expected.

This is quite a simple example but the method could be applied to creating a html table row or even the whole table.