Question

I have a view that displays a list of comments. Now a comment can have a document associated to it so as I am displaying each comment I need to check whether or not “AttachedDocumentID” has a value and if so display a HTML.ActionLink to it.

Not sure on the best way to do this to avoid having an if statement in the view (which I’m led to believe is bad form) and I didn’t really want to have any html code generated in the helper.

What other options do I have?

Answer 1

Personally I’d do it as an if statement in the view as it’s clear what you’re intending, but you could add an extension method if you wanted:

public static MvcHtmlString AttachedDocumentLink(this HtmlHelper helper, string text, string action, string controller, int? attachedDocumentId)
{
    return attachedDocumentId == null ? MvcHtmlString.Empty : helper.ActionLink(text, action, controller, new { id = attachedDocumentId }, null);
}

Then call it in your view like normal

<%= Html.AttachedDocumentLink("Document", "AttachedDocument", "Posts", comment.AttachedDocumentId) %>