Question

For an application i am working on, I need to have the image captions span multiple lines. Playing around I was able to get the desired effect from this markup:

<a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com">Stack<br>Overflow</a>

rendered this for me:

Stack
Overflow

However I have been unable to find the right way to generate a link description for HTML.ActionLink that will render this kind of output.

Answer 1

If the urls is not part of your web site using an HTML helper to generate this link wouldn’t bring much value. Instead simply write it as is. And if it is part of your site and you could use routing to reach the address you could write a custom HTML helper which doesn’t HTML encode the link text by default:

public static class HtmlExtensions
{
    public static MvcHtmlString MyActonLink(
        this HtmlHelper html, 
        string linkText, 
        string action, 
        string controller, 
        object routeValues, 
        object htmlAttributes
    )
    {
        var urlHelper = new UrlHelper(html.ViewContext.RequestContext);
        var url = urlHelper.Action(action, controller, routeValues);
        var anchor = new TagBuilder("a");
        anchor.InnerHtml = linkText;
        anchor.Attributes["href"] = url;
        anchor.MergeAttributes(new RouteValueDictionary(htmlAttributes));
        return MvcHtmlString.Create(anchor.ToString());
    }
}

and in your view:

@Html.MyActonLink(
    "Stack<br/>Overflow",    // linkText
    "MyAction",              // actionName
    "MyController",          // controllerName
    new { id = "123" },      // routeValues
    new { @class = "foo" }   // htmlAttributes
)