Dash (-) in anonymous class member

Question

is it possible to use dash (-) in a member name of an anonymous class? I'm mainly interested in this to use with asp.net mvc to pass custom attributes to html-helpers, since I want my html to pass html5-validation, this starting with data-.

Exemple that doesn't work:

<%=Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Something, new {data-animal = "pony"})%> 

Putting a @ in front of the member name doesn't do the trick either.

Update: If this isn't possible, is there a recommended way todo what I want? My current temporary solution is to add a replace to the whole thing like this:

<%=Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Something, new {data___animal = "pony"}).Replace("___", "-")%> 

But that sucks, because it's ugly and will break when Model.Something contains three underscores. Buhu.

Answer 1

Just found this post while searchching for the same problem.

I found this link: http://blogs.planetcloud.co.uk/mygreatdiscovery/post/Using-custom-data-attributes-in-ASPNET-MVC.aspx

It resolves the problem. It mentions the following:

[...] or better yet, just use code from ASP.NET MVC source:

public static RouteValueDictionary AnonymousObjectToHtmlAttributes(object htmlAttributes) {     RouteValueDictionary result = new RouteValueDictionary();     if (htmlAttributes != null)     {         foreach (System.ComponentModel.PropertyDescriptor property in System.ComponentModel.TypeDescriptor.GetProperties(htmlAttributes))         {             result.Add(property.Name.Replace('_', '-'), property.GetValue(htmlAttributes));         }     }     return result; } 

Answer 2

Collecting the Asp-Mvc version specific ways to do data- here:

MVC 3+ : Use an underscore _ and it will be automatically replaced by mvc
MVC 1?,2: see @Jean-Francois answer, which points to this