ASP.NET # MVC # 17 – Html.ActionLink and Html.RouteLink Helper Methods

 

Hi Geeks,

Today we will see Html.ActionLink and Html.RouteLink Helper methods.

I )Html.ActionLink

** The ActionLink method renders a hyperlink (anchor tag) to another Controller action. This method uses the Routing API under the hood to generate the URL. For example, when linking to another action within the same Controller used to render the current View, you can simply specify the action name:

     <%: Html.ActionLink("Link Text", "AnotherAction") %>

     This produces the following markup, assuming the default routes:

     <a href=”/Home/AnotherAction”>LinkText</a>

You can specify a Controller name as the third argument to link to an action of another Controller.For example, to link to the AccountController.Withdraw action, use:

<%: Html.ActionLink("Link Text", "Withdraw", "Account") %>

 

Note :Notice that you specify the Controller name without the Controller suffix. You never specify the Controller’s type name.
In many cases, you have more route parameters than you need to supply in order to choose the correct URL to render for the action link. In that case, you can specify a RouteValueDictionary for the routeValues argument. The following example uses the overload that accepts the anonymous object overload for route values to specify the ID:

 <%: Html.ActionLink("Link Text", "Withdraw", "Account", new {id=34231}, null) %>

** To specify HTML attributes, provide a value for the htmlAttributes argument. This accepts an IDictionary<string, object>, but for ease of use, you can call the overload that accepts an anonymous object:

<%: Html.ActionLink("LinkText", "About", "Account", null,
new {title="withdraw from account"}) %>

II) Html.RouteLink

The ActionLink methods have specific knowledge about ASP.NET MVC Controllers and actions.
Hence, these methods provide convenient overloads that allow the specifying of a controllerName and actionName directly.

The RouteLink methods follow the same pattern as the ActionLink methods but also accept a
route name and do not have arguments for Controller name and action name. For example, the first example ActionLink shown previously is equivalent to the following:

<%: Html.RouteLink("Link Text", new {action="AnotherAction"}) %>

(REFERENCE – Professional.ASP.NET.MVC.2 Wrox publication)

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