Why is there no intellisense in ASP.Net MVC 2.0 when assigning Model values to JavaScript?

Question

I'm trying to add some Model properties into my JavaScript within my content page:

$(document).ready(function () {
    createPager(1, <%=Model.TotalPages %>);
    createUnprocessedPager(1, <%=Model.TotalUnprocessedPages %>);
});

Does anyone know if this is by design? Are you not meant to combine Model properties with JavaScript? Or is this a bug?

This works as expected. However, I do not have any Intellisense within the <% ... %> tags when actually writing the code. If I write any code within <script> tags, then there's no Intellisense. If I go directly under the tag </script> and type <% Model.... %> then boom, I have Intellisense again.

UPDATE: 22/10/2010

Just read Scott Guthrie's latest blog post and it appears this functionality is coming out soon with the up coming release of ASP.Net MVC 3 (possibly for the beta as well):

Note: Visual Studio Code/Markup Intellisense and Colorization within Razor files aren’t enabled yet with the Beta earlier this month. You’ll see this show up in a few weeks though – and it will support full code intellisense for HTML, JavaScript, CSS and C#/VB code within Razor files.

Answer 1

There is also no syntax highlighting I think. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature, but AFAIK, combining the code this way isn't a good practice. Generally inline javascript is not a good practice, but if you go with it, combine Model properties with it, and later decide to extract the scripts into a separate js file, your code will break. Therefore, it is quite common to populate hidden fields with your Model properties and read them in your js with jQuery, e.g.:

<input type="hidden" id="valTotalPages" value="<%=Model.TotalPages %>" />
<input type="hidden" id="valTotalUnprocessedPages" value="<%=Model.TotalUnprocessedPages %>" />

... 

// in js
$(document).ready(function () {
    createPager(1, $("#valTotalPages").val());
    createUnprocessedPager(1, $("#valTotalUnprocessedPages").val());
});

So lack of syntax highlighting and intellisense might be a bug, but might as well be a way of discouraging certain code patterns.

Answer 2

You will loose you Intellisense in the views inside quotes "" like attributes.

<input type="text" value="<%= DateTime.Today.ToShortDateString() %>" />

or if it appears inside of Javascript blocks.

<script type="text/javascript">
    <%= DateTime.Today.ToShortDateString() %>
    </script>

It is my opinion that there should be Intellisense in these scenarios, so I would say it is a bug and hope future updates to Visual Studio will address and resolve this.