How to display an dynamic image name with Razor

Question

I'm rather new to MVC and have recently started a Asp.Net MVC3 project, using the Razor view engine.

At the moment I'm having trouble with outputting an image name into an html img tag with Razor.

Say I have a Car class in my model, with a string property called ModelName. I also have a folder with images of the car model, they are named after the car model so that I can by convention show the image of a specific model, by just using the name.

From my controller I pass down a collection of Cars to my view and do the following to show a list of car model images:

@foreach (var item in Model) {
<img src='@item.ModelName.png' />
}

However if I try to run this, I get the error:

Compiler Error Message: CS1061: 'string' does not contain a definition for 'png' and no extension method 'png' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

I also tried

    @foreach (var item in Model) {
     <img src='@{item.ModelName}.png' />
    }

But that results in:

Compiler Error Message: CS1528: Expected ; or = (cannot specify constructor arguments in >declaration) Source Error:

Line 84: #line default Line 85: #line hidden Line 86: WriteLiteral(".png\' ">\r\n"); Line 88:

I can get around it by doing:

@foreach (var item in Model) {
     string imageName = string.Format("{0}.png", item.ModelName);
     <img src='@imageName' />
    }

But that feels quite clunky, surely there must be a better way??

Answer 1

You can also do:

@foreach (var item in Model) 
{
    <img src="@(item.ModelName).png" />
}

Or make a Helper:

public static MVCHtmlString Image<T>(this HtmlHelper helper, string name)
{
    TagBuilder img=new TagBuilder("img");
    img.Attributes.Add("src", name+".png");
    return new MvcHtmlString(img.ToString());
}

and use it like:

@foreach (var item in Model) 
{
    @Html.Image(item.ModelName)
}

Answer 2

@foreach (var item in Model._imageList)
{
    <tr>
        <td>
            @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.FriendlyName)
        </td>
        <td>
            @Html.DisplayFor(modelItem => item.CreateDate)
        </td>
        <td>
             <img src="@Url.Content(item.ImagePath)" alt="Image" />
        </td>
        <td>
            @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "UploadImageEdit", new { id = item.ImageID }) |
            @Html.ActionLink("Details", "UploadImageDetails", new { id = item.ImageID }) |
            @Html.ActionLink("Delete", "UploadImageDelete", new { id = item.ImageID })
        </td>
    </tr>
}

This will display the image that is saved on the file system, but the file path is saved in the database while using a foreach loop.