Question

I have some text which is loaded from a resource file. Ordinarily, to get dynamic content I would use:

string.Format(GetLocalResourceObject("SomeText"), PhoneNumberAsString) 

I want to do the same with a link, only the link needs to be application relative as I have URLs like mysite.com/page.aspx and mysite.com/fr/page.aspx.

I normally use an <asp:HyperLink /> tag to create the links as I can then just put a squiggle at the start NavigateUrl="~/page.aspx". However, I don’t know of a way to get a dynamic HyperLink to appear as a string without adding it as a control to something.

Simply writing ToString() outputs System.Web.UI.WebControls.HyperLink..

How do I get a link out of a resource file and make it into a hyperlink using ASP.NET Webforms?

UPDATE

With some help from the answers I now have the following code on my page:

<p><%= string.Format(GetGlobalResourceObject("Resource", "MoreThan1000Users").ToString(), ResolveUrl("~/contact-us.aspx")) %></p>

and in my resource file I have:

If you would like more than 1000 users please <a href="{0}">call our sales team</a>.

Does this seem like good practice or is there another way to achieve what I’m doing? I don’t know if I should be happy or not that there is HTML inside the resource file.

Answer 1

Since you haven’t posted code, I’m guessing somewhere you have a HyperLink WebControl object that you’re hitting ToString() on. If that’s the case, you can access the URL associated with it using its myHyperLinkControl.NavigateUrl property.

If you’re storing the link in your resource with a squiggle/tilde (which is good) then you can replace the squiggle with your application location. If you have a control/page, then you can easily call its ResolveURL method (which takes the tilde and automatically replaces it) There’s some existing solutions if you don’t have a control/page reference with your context, then there’s some discussion to do that here: ResolveUrl without an ASP.NET Page