Custom ActionLink helper that knows what page you're on

Question

I have a small MVC site that uses the Html.ActionLink helper for a navbar. One thing I would like to change is that the default ActionLink will render out an html link to a page even if that is the current page.

For example, it creates a link like this:

<a href="/myUrl">Some title...</a>

even if you're already on /myUrl. It would be nice if it would disable that link and maybe insert a special CSS class to show the currently visited page, like this:

<a href="#" class="currentPageCSS">My Url</a>
<a href="/someOtherUrl">Some Other Url</a>

This problem must have been encountered before on loads of MVC sites, so I'm curious to know how other people have tackled it.

Answer 1

This seems like a good scenario to roll a custom HTML helper. So let's roll it:

public static class LinkExtensions
{
    public static MvcHtmlString MyActionLink(
        this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, 
        string linkText, 
        string action, 
        string controller
    )
    {
        var currentAction = htmlHelper.ViewContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("action");
        var currentController = htmlHelper.ViewContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller");
        if (action == currentAction && controller == currentController)
        {
            var anchor = new TagBuilder("a");
            anchor.Attributes["href"] = "#";
            anchor.AddCssClass("currentPageCSS");
            anchor.SetInnerText(linkText);
            return MvcHtmlString.Create(anchor.ToString());
        }
        return htmlHelper.ActionLink(linkText, action, controller);
    }
}

and inside your view:

<%= Html.MyActionLink("hello foo", "Index", "Home") %>
<%= Html.MyActionLink("hello bar", "About", "Home") %>
...

and depending on where you are the helper will generate the proper anchor.