Problems with Url.Action helper with multiple route values

Question

I'm currently developing an ASP.NET MVC3 application in VS2010 and I'm having some troubles with @Url.Action helper. I have an ajax request where I use this helper:

var url = '@Url.Action("Action", "Controler", new { a = "a", b = "b" })';
$.post(url).success(function(data) { 
    ... 
});

The problem is that the value of url after this is /Controller/Action?a=a&b=b, note the & between the route values. This isn't working, but if I do:

var url = '@Url.Action("Action", "Controler", new { a = "a", b = "b" })'.replace('amp;', '');

it works perfectly!!!

My action is something like this:

public JsonResult Action(string a, string b) 
{
    ...
}

I have debugged my app and the action gets called and even a is "a", but b is null.

Is this the desired behavior of Url.Action? I don't think so. Please help me, what am I doing wrong? Should I add another parameter to my Url.Action call? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The issue here is that when you're using razor syntax: @... the razor engine is encoding the result of Url.Action (which is a string) as an MvcHtmlString. This results in ampersands being encoded as &. To get around this, use Html.Raw (Returns markup that is not HTML encoded.)

var url = '@Html.Raw(Url.Action("Action", "Controller", new { a = "a", b = "b" }))';

Resulting in: '/Controller/Action?a=a&b=b'

Thanks to @GSerg (See comment in Dave Alperovich's answer)... but the desired result isn't javascript encoding. Using HttpUtility.JavaScriptStringEncode("&") results in '\u0026'