Problem setting an html attribute containing hyphens in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I have defined a custom html attribute "data-something-something". In my view I use an Html extension method to create for instance a text box. One of the parameters is an anonymous object HtmlAttributes. I want to pass this value: new { data-something-something = "value" }. However, data-something-something is not recognized by .NET as a property name because of the hyphens.

I changed it to dataSomethingSomething for now, but I would like to define my custom attribute according to the HTML 5 standard (i.e. prefix it with 'data-').

I had a similar problem before when trying to do new { class = "class-name"} on the class property. For this case I found that I can prefix class with an '@' symbol to make it work (i.e. new { @class = "class-name"}). Because there is a solution for this scenario, I hoped that there might be a solution for my current problem (prefixing it with an '@' did not work).

Thanks in advance.

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 28 '11 at 08:24

29

Try using underscores which should be automatically converted into dashes by the standard HTML helpers:

new { data_something_something = "value" }

answered Feb 28 '11 at 08:24

Darin Dimitrov

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Neato! I was hoping for something like this. – Matthijs Wessels Feb 28 '11 at 08:33
@Matthijs Wessels, are you using a custom HTML helper? If yes, please show your helper code and usage. This definitely works with the built-in helpers. Try it: `@Html.TextBoxFor(x => x.Foo, new { data_something_something = "value" })`. – Darin Dimitrov Feb 28 '11 at 09:53
I only use built-in helpers. Already tried it and it worked :) – Matthijs Wessels Feb 28 '11 at 13:01

Problem setting an html attribute containing hyphens in ASP.NET MVC

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