Action and ActionLink not working on ASP.NET Mono Razor views

Question

How to use hyper linking in Razor without @Url.* or @Html.*

There are 4 ways to hyperly link views in ASP.NET MVC as far as I know:

@Url.Action
@Url.ActionLink
@Html.Action
@Html.ActionLink

I can use them as, for example:

<a href=@Url.Action("ActionName","ControllerName")> Test </a>

Which generates:

<a href="ControllerName/ActionName"> Test </a>

Is there a way to generate the Url part i.e. "ControllerName/ActionName" in ASP.NET MVC Razor apart from the above mentioned 4 ways?

Background: Mono is not able to recognize these kind of Razor components. If some kind of Url generation works out then we can use ASP.NET MVC 5 with Razor on Mono.

All Url generation code goes through the same codepath at the end, so I doubt any existing methods using Route Table would work...If you can't rebuild Mono - Consider reading the code and building your own helper that builds Url based on routing table/attributes. — Alexei Levenkov, May 31 '15 at 17:09
You right @AlexeiLevenkov. I have the same doubt, but I just wanted to give it a try. Maybe if it works out. The last resort would be to make some kind of helper. — Zameer Ansari, May 31 '15 at 17:14
@AlexeiLevenkov - Hey, you're a MS guy!!! Just one question - is MS billing Xamarin for making Mono ASP.NET MVC work on Linux. Mono MVC works best on Windows but on Linux it keep failing. What are MS's plans for it? — Zameer Ansari, May 31 '15 at 17:19
@teovankot - but how can I refer to an Action in a Controller? in Webforms it is pretty straightforward. e.g: ` Test ` — Zameer Ansari, May 31 '15 at 17:21
@zameeramir you already write it =) `href="ControllerName/ActionName"` that's how you reffer — teo van kot, May 31 '15 at 17:23
@teovankot - many +1s for opening my eyes. But after clicking the anchor it demonstrates some strange behavior. I'm updating the question. — Zameer Ansari, May 31 '15 at 17:28
@zameeramir I have as much information as you can get about plans of other teams - whatever is publicly available on blogs :). (I'm also not particularly involved with Xamarin, so I can't even recommend possible good source of info you are looking for). — Alexei Levenkov, May 31 '15 at 17:31
There is no such method `@Url.ActionLink()` and `@Html.Action()` does not create a link (it calls a controller method to render a partial view) — , May 31 '15 at 23:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 31 '15 at 17:49

Well, you can always look up ASP.NET MVC source code, and copy what you need, if it is not implemented in mono yet. Here you can find it: https://github.com/ASP-NET-MVC/aspnetwebstack/blob/master/src/System.Web.Mvc/Html/LinkExtensions.cs

But I've been using mono and ASP.NET MVC 4, and I had no problem like you. Here is my code on github, it was running on mono and xsp. https://github.com/rstraszewski/HomeCenter/tree/master/HomeCenter.Presentation

As you can see, for example in _Layout.cshtml, I was using Html.ActionLink...Although I was using windows and visual studio for compiling and developing, and mono only for runtime...

You can also create your own html helpers to generate links... And there is also a Html.RouteLink helper method, which also can generate you a link.

Example of using Html.RouteLink:

@Html.RouteLink("Some link", "Default", new RouteValueDictionary(new {controller = "Home", action = "Index"}))

Yes, you can also use something like:

<a href="~/Home/Index">Some link</a>

Notice that the ~/ is important in the above snippet, without it the Url demonstrates a strange behaviour but you need to remember, that this will work, because this is how default routing is working... If you change default routing, this can not work.

Action and ActionLink not working on ASP.NET Mono Razor views

1 Answers1