Question

Just wondering what the difference is between these two and what the benefit for one or the other of them would be when I build my table in my HtmlHelper

HtmlTable table = new HtmlTable();

and:

TagBuilder table = new TagBuilder("table");

This is more or less the same as this question,

Why use TagBuilder instead of StringBuilder?

but I’m wondering more specifically about the difference between these two .

Answer 1

The main difference is that HtmlTable provides typed and correctly named properties for all the valid HTML attributes of the <table> element (e.g. Width, Height, CellSpacing, etc). It also has the Rows property which is a typed collection of HtmlTableRow objects which each reresent a <tr> element.

TagBuilder is a much more generic API which could certainly be used to construct an HTML <table> but you’d need to do more work in a less type safe and less easy to read way.

One concrete example where HmlTable helps in a way that TagBuilder does not is in the setting of the width="" attribute on the <table> element.

With HtmlTable:

HtmlTable htmlTable = new HtmlTable();
htmlTable.Width = "100px";

With TagBuilder:

TagBuilder tagBuilder = new TagBuilder("table");
tagBuilder.Attributes["width"] = "100px";

Note that with TagBuilder both the name of the element, table, and the name of the attribute, width, are strings which introduce two opportunities for error (misspellings) that do not occur when using HtmlTable.