Question

I have the following block of Razor markup:

@section StoreSearch
{
    @Html.Partial("SearchPartial", Model)
}
<section id="gallery-index">
...
</section>
<nav class="pager">
    <a href="#" rel="prev" class="pager-nav" title="Previous Page">Prev</a> Page @(Model.PageIndex + 1) of @Model.PageCount <a href="#" rel ="next" class="pager-nav" title="Next Page">Next</a>
</nav>

I would like to surround this whole block with a form, as in

@using (Html.BeginForm("Index", "Gallery", FormMethod.Post, new { id = "search-form" }))
{
    @section StoreSearch
    {
        @Html.Partial("SearchPartial", Model)
    }
    <section id="gallery-index">
        ...
}

Yet when I do that, the parser seems to balk at the @section StoreSearch part, and complains “Cannot resolve symbol StoreSearch”.

Is what I’m trying to do not allowed, or am I just missing some sort of escaping method?

Answer 1

Looks like you found a bug in the Razor parsing engine. Most likely the first @ sign in a using clause is being parsed as a variable, which in your case is actually a function so it’s throwing an exception. For now the solution is to surround your section with a div (or any html element really).

@using (Html.BeginForm("Index", "Gallery", FormMethod.Post, 
                       new { id = "search-form" }))
{
  <div>
    @section StoreSearch
    {
      @Html.Partial("SearchPartial", Model)
    }
    <section id="gallery-index">
    ...
    </section>
  </div>
}