The title is quite vague, but this is the best I can call this post. Bear with me, I’ll explain what I mean.

While working with Asp.Net MVC, in Razor views I use Html helpers a lot. My view end up looking like this:

@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Title)
@Html.TextAreaFor(m => m.Description)

And later if I write JavaScript and need to reference one of the input fields, I usually do this:

var title = document.getElementById("Title");
var description = document.getElementById("Description");

or if you use jQuery you go like this:

var title = $("#Title");
var description = $("#Description");

This is fine and works. Until you start renaming field names in your model. And then you need to track down where you hard-coded the input id. And many times these references slip away (they do from me!) and remain unchanged.

Would it not be great if these changed could be picked up automatically? or even better, do some sort of strongly-typed reference to the element if it is used in JavaScript?

Just use @Html.IdFor(m => m.Name)

And your JS code would look like this:

var title = document.getElementById("@Html.IdFor(m => m.Title)");
var description = $("#@Html.IdFor(m => m.Description)");

Below I’ve re-invented the wheel. [Facepalm]

So I trolled through MVC source code and figured out how it generates id’s for elements and here are my findings:

using System;
using System.Linq.Expressions;
using System.Web.Mvc;

public static class HtmlHelpers
{
    public static String ElementId<T, TResult>(this HtmlHelper<T> htmlHelper, Expression<Func<T, TResult>> selector)
    {
        var text = System.Web.Mvc.ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(selector);
        var fullName = htmlHelper.ViewContext.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(text);
        var id = TagBuilder.CreateSanitizedId(fullName);

        return id;
    }
}

@Html.ElementId(m => m.Title)

var title = document.getElementById("@Html.ElementId(m => m.Title)");
var description = document.getElementById("@Html.ElementId(m => m.Description)");

A bit of mouthful, but gives you the safety net of strong types. I have not actually used it widely, so not sure how it’ll work out in the longer run.