mvc actionlink show html tags

Question

how can i show html tags like this

html.actionlinlk("<b>bla bla</b>", null)

it dislay bla bla not bold bla bla-is it possible to show bold text?

Answer 1

I think your looking for:

<b><%= Html.ActionLink("bla bla", null) %></b>

Update

Ah ok I see what you are looking for. Well the first parameter of the ActionLink extension method is the link text (of the anchor element). As far as I am aware it should support HTML tags.

e.g.

<a href="http://stackoverflow.com"&gt;stack&lt;b&gt;overflow&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt; gives you stackoverflow

Answer 2

Databases are for storing data. HTML is markup. Don't store HTML inside a database. As you've mixed data and markup you will now need to extract the data (bla bla) from the markup and formatting (<b>). There are tools allowing you to parse HTML such as HTML Agility Pack. You could always try parsing it with a regular expression but as you may see this is not recommended.

So my suggestion is to modify your design and separate markup from real data.

Answer 3

I strongly agree with Darin Dimitrov. You should not store html in your db. But you can solve this problem anyway. Ether you use Url.Action and write the <a /> tag your self. Like this:

<a href="<%=Url.Action("action", "controller")%>">Text</a>

Or you will have to build your own html extension for actionlink as the default one (correctly) html encodes the value you put in.

I would suggest the first one as I think you should write the html your self instead of using a helper. It's not hard to write a <a /> tag.

Answer 4

My solution about this problem was to create an extension method. You can read the (short) full story here.