Question

I’ve decided upon the HtmlHelper rather than a partial view for this functionality.

Does anyone have an example that might accept, say, a collection of Author objects and output a comma-separated string (MvcHtmlString?) of links to their books?

Answer 1

Are you looking for this.

public static class ListHelperExtension
{
    public static string ToCommaSeperatedAnchorTags(this List<Author> Authorlst)
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (var author in Authorlst)
        {
            foreach (string bookName in author.Books)
            {             
                //you can also use TagBuilder      
                sb.Append("<a href='#'>");
                sb.Append(bookName);
                sb.Append("</a>");
            }            
        }            
        return sb.ToString();
    }
}

call this using

 List<Author> lst = new List<Author>{
            new Author {Name = "J k Rowling",Books = new List<string> { "Harry Potter1", "Harry Potter2"}},
            new Author {Name = "John Rogers",Books = new List<string> { "Transformers1", "Transformers2"}}
        };

 string str = lst.ToCommaSeperatedAnchorTags();

---

If you want to make it as HtmlHelper to use it in Views you can write it as

public static class HtmlHelpers
{
    public static MvcHtmlString ToCommaSeperatedAnchorTags(this HtmlHelper helper, List<Author> Authorlst)
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (var author in Authorlst)
        {
            foreach (string bookName in author.Books)
            {
                sb.Append("<a href='#'>");
                sb.Append(bookName);
                sb.Append("</a>");
            }
        }

        return new MvcHtmlString(sb.ToString());
    }
}

and in the view you can add it as

@Html.ToCommaSeperatedAnchorTags(Model.lst)