Public variables in MVC 3 Razor _ViewStart

Question

I'm building a site on the new Razor engine that comes with MVC 3 (and loving the new syntax!). However, I am at a loss about using public properties / constants with it. I know that with WebForms we could add a public property in code behind:

public string ImageFolder { get; set; }

I would like to define important variables in one global place that my views can access, starting with paths to CSS files and images:

@{
    Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml";
    var ContentFolder = "~/Content";
    var CssFolder = ContentFolder + "/Stylesheets";
    var ImageFolder = ContentFolder + "/Images";
}

I have tried putting the above code block in _Layout, as well as inside _ViewStart. However, accessing them from child views fails miserably. I thought of defining a public property in the above code block but it doesn't compile.

Solutions?

• As far as I have seen, noone uses code behind with Razor.
• I guess I should be able to inherit from the default view and define my properties there (as described on Stack).

But I'm strongly hoping that there should be an easier way to do something so simple?

Answer 1

I decided to follow yet another path, and extended UrlHelper to provide paths to all three folders I think I might need:

public static class ExtensionMethods
{
    private const string ImagesFolder = "~/Images";
    private const string StylesheetsFolder = "~/Stylesheets";
    private const string ScriptsFolder = "~/Scripts";

    public static string Images(this UrlHelper url)
    {
        return url.Content(ImagesFolder);
    }

    public static string Stylesheets(this UrlHelper url)
    {
        return url.Content(StylesheetsFolder);
    }

    public static string Scripts(this UrlHelper url)
    {
        return url.Content(ScriptsFolder);
    }
}

All good to go... almost :-) I'm now wondering if there's a place where I would be able to define the using MyNamespace.Helper statement would go in order for these extension methods to be available application-wide. In the old days we would add an entry in web.config:

<system.web>
    <pages>
        <namespaces>
            <add namespace="MyNamespace.Helper"/>
        </namespaces>
    </pages>
</system.web>

This doesn't seem to work with Razor :-( I tried adding a using statement in _ViewStart.cshtml but no luck either - the only way for my extension methods to be visible is to add a using statement on a particular page, which again isn't ideal.

Any suggestions? Have any of you seen an explanation of Razor's order of page parsing & delivery?

Answer 2

Your can create a folder "App_Code" and create a file "GlobalVal.cshtml". bellow is a sample code in the file:

@functions{
    public static readonly string __siteHome = "http://www.example.com";
    public static readonly string __siteResource = "http://resource.example.com";
}

and bellow is a sample using it:

<a href="@GlobalVal.__siteHome/home/index">@GlobalVal.__siteHome</a>