Question

I’m not even sure if this is possible, but I thought I would check to see if there is any way to make this easier.

First, I have some repeated markup in my site that looks like this:

<div class="module">
    <h3>Title</h3>
    <div>
        <p>Information goes here</p>
    </div>
</div>

What I want to do is wrap this up in some kind of helper/section so that I could do something like this

@MyHelper("This is my Title") {
    <p>Here is my custom markup</p>
}

Then, when it renders, it would inject the title passed in through the parameter between the <h3></h3> and the custom markup in the divs. The custom markup could be anything from test, to form controls, to a partial view. Is this something that is possible?

Answer 1

Well, here’s a “standard” way of doing something close to it, using an HTML helper extension. A very simple version of what Html.BeginForm() does.

Approach: Simply return an IDisposable, and let the using statement take care of the rest.

This is just an example of the concept (although it works). Not intended for immediate reuse. Written quickly with lots of shortcuts, not production code, plenty of opportunities for improvement and optimization, may have silly mistakes, could use TagBuilder etc. etc. Could easily be modified to reuse the Wrapper class for different… wrappings (there may even be a generic one already in ASP.NET MVC – haven’t had a need for one).

public static class WrapHelper
{
    private class Wrapper : IDisposable
    {
        private bool disposed;
        private readonly TextWriter writer;

        public Wrapper(HtmlHelper html)
        {
            this.writer = html.ViewContext.Writer;
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            if (disposed) return;

            disposed = true;

            writer.WriteLine("  </div>");
            writer.WriteLine("</div>");
        }
    }

    public static IDisposable Wrap(this HtmlHelper html, string title)
    {
        TextWriter writer = html.ViewContext.Writer;

        writer.WriteLine("<div class=\"module\">");
        writer.WriteLine("  <h3>" + html.Encode(title) + "</h3>");
        writer.WriteLine("  <div>");

        return new Wrapper(html);
    }
}

Usage:

@using (Html.Wrap("Title"))
{
    <p>My very own markup.</p>
}