Passing an object to HTML attributes

Question

How to pass an object to HTML attributes? For example I have the following code:

var attrs = new { id = "myid", style = "color: Red;" }; 

How to convert attrs to string like this to embed them into an HTML markup:

id="myid" style="color: Red;" 

Thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

This functionality is, surprisingly enough, provided by the RouteValueDictionary class:

IDictionary<string, object> htmlAttributes = new RouteValueDictionary(attrs); 

You can then use this dictionary in conjunction with a TagBuilder, which you will probably be using anyway:

var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder("input"); tagBuilder.MergeAttributes(htmlAttributes); tagBuilder.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal); 

You can see this done in the ASP.NET MVC source code itself; one of the simpler examples is in TextAreaExtensions.cs.

EDIT:

In order to properly convert "data_attr" to "data-attr", use the AnonymousObjectToHtmlAttributes static method.

IDictionary<string, object> htmlAttributes = HtmlHelper.AnonymousObjectToHtmlAttributes(attrs); 

Answer 2

You do not need to convert to a string. The last paramater for HTML Helpers is an Object. You just give it the object like you have written above:

For exmample

@Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Foo, new { size = 10, maxlength = 10 })  @Html.TextAreaFor(x => x.Notes, new { @class = "additionalInfo" }) @Html.TextBoxFor(x=>x.Registration.Address.Postcode, new {type="number", @class="postcode numeric", size=5, maxlength=5}) 

on a side note you probably should not be setting styles directy inline with your HTML and use a CSS class/selector instead with a seperate style sheet. Also the ID of each DOM element should automatically be set when you use MVC HTML helpers