How to alter the rendering of links in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

Our designers have come up with button styles for an application which require the addition of <span> tags inside the <a> tags of our links.

In ASP.NET we implemented this by adding an App_Browsers entry for Link Buttons.

How would I go about doing this in ASP.NET MVC?

I've contemplated creating my own versions of all of the various HTML helper functions for creating ActionLinks and RouteLinks but this seems to be quite a 'brute force' way of doing things.

Is there a nice elegant way of doing it?

I know we could write some simple jQuery to do it, but we'd rather have the markup coming out of the server correctly in the first place.

Answer 1

Actually I think writing a new helper is exactly the way I would go. Seems to me that that's exactly what they are there for and it makes them very re-usable too.

Answer 2

You could always write one extension method, that takes another one (one of the built-in ones) as an argument, and wrappes the <span> around your link text before calling it. It should be quite easy to do with lambdas...

public static string SpanLink(this HtmlHelper helper,
    string linkText, object args, Action<string> action) 
    where TController : IController
{
    action("<span>" + linkText + "</span>", args);
}

And to call it:

<%= Html.SpanLink<HomeController>("link text", (s) => Html.ActionLink<HomeController>(c => c.Index(s));

(This code is typed directly into the answer field of SO - I haven't even checked it to make sure it compiles. So bear with me if it doesn't work on the first try...)