Question

I am creating LOB business application using ASP.NET MVC. In my views I find this pattern repeated a lot:

<div class="editor-label">
    @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name)
</div>
<div class="editor-field">
    @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name)
    @Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name)
</div>

It must be possible to write a helper to reduce it down to something like this:

@EditorForField(model => model.Name)

This will make the views simpler, and make it easier to change the form layout to table based layout (if required)

Any ideas how to make such a helper method?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I was able to make this work by this code:

public static class HelperExtensions
{
    public static MvcHtmlString EditorForField<TModel, TValue>(
        this HtmlHelper<TModel> html, 
        Expression<Func<TModel, TValue>> expression)
    {
        const string template = @"<div class=""editor-label"">{0}</div><div     class=""editor-field"">{1}{2}</div>";

        string markup = string.Format(template, 
            html.LabelFor(expression), 
            html.EditorFor(expression),
            html.ValidationMessageFor(expression));

        return new MvcHtmlString(markup);
    }
}

In your View:

@Html.EditorForField(model => model.Name)