Question

I have the following code inside a partial view:

@if (Request.IsAuthenticated)
{
    Hello, @Html.ActionLink(User.Identity.Name, "ChangePassword", "Account") | Html.ActionLink("Log off", "LogOff", "Account")
}
else
{
    @Html.ActionLink("Log in", "Login", "Account")
}

Expected output (with appropriate links to actions):

• If logged in: Hello Jim | Log off
• If not logged in: Log in

However, this results in errors:

• Within VS, The word “Hello” has an error on it: “Cannot resolve symbol ‘Hello'” and “&#” has “Expression expected”
• In the browser I get “CS1040: Preprocessor directives must appear as the first non-whitespace character on a line”

If I put a <p>...</p> around the line beginning with “Hello” the error goes away.

There is obviously some syntax error with my mixing calls to @Html and text within the same line. What is the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

The contents of a code block ({ ... }) are expected to be code, not markup.

If you want to put text directly in a code block, you have three choices:

• Wrap it in any HTML tag
• Wrap it in the special Razor <text> tag, which will just render the text without the tag
• Prepend the line with @:, which is equivalent

See SottGu’s blog post.