ASP.NET MVC Razor View Engine and Resources

The Razor view engine shipped with ASP.NET MVC 3 is very clean and has some nice coding enhancements, see a introduction on Scott Gu’s blog.  As I was converting a application over to use the new view engine, I was stumped to find that the global/local resource method was not directly accessible as it was with the default view engine.  In order to access a resource you would have to type the following expression ViewContext.HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject(classKey, resourceKey) which is quite length.  To mitigate this, I create some common extensions to clean up the code.  Below shows a clean way of doing this.

public static class CommonHtmlExtensions
{
    public static object GetGlobalResource(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string classKey, string resourceKey)
    {
        return htmlHelper.ViewContext.HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject(classKey, resourceKey);
    }

    public static object GetGlobalResource(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string classKey, string resourceKey, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        return htmlHelper.ViewContext.HttpContext.GetGlobalResourceObject(classKey, resourceKey, culture);
    }

    public static object GetLocalResource(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string classKey, string resourceKey)
    {
        return htmlHelper.ViewContext.HttpContext.GetLocalResourceObject(classKey, resourceKey);
    }

    public static object GetLocalResource(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, string classKey, string resourceKey, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        return htmlHelper.ViewContext.HttpContext.GetLocalResourceObject(classKey, resourceKey, culture);
    }

}

 

In the view you will have consolidate resource calls.  Hopefully they will add something like this in the future of ASP.NET MVC.

 

@Html.GetGlobalResource("CommonText", "Some_ResourceKey")