Question

I want to include a link in my SiteMaster (using Html.ActionLink) UNLESS the view that I am linking to is the current view. For example, there is no sense displaying a ‘Register’ link when the user is already seeing the ‘Register’ view.

In Ruby on Rails, I use the ‘link_to_unless_current’ method to do this.

How do I duplicate this behavior in ASP.NET MVC? The best I can come up with is to set a boolean in my controller to indicate that the link should be hidden (since it is current). This seems really awkward compared to the Rails approach, so I think I must be missing something.

Answer 1

I am not aware of such helper method in ASP.NET MVC but it should be pretty easy to roll your own:

public static class HtmlExtensions {     public static string ActionLinkUnlessCurrent(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string linkText, string actionName)     {         string currentAction = htmlHelper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values['action'].ToString();         if (actionName != currentAction)         {             return htmlHelper.ActionLink(linkText, actionName);         }         return linkText;     } } 

And then use it like this:

<%= Html.ActionLinkUnlessCurrent('Link Text', 'Index') %>