What templating library can be used with Asp .NET MVC? - asp.net-mvc

Question

In my MVC 5 app I need to be able to dynamically construct a list of fully qualified external URL hyperlinks, alone with some additional data, which will come from the Model passed in. I figure - I will need to construct my anchor tags something like this:
{{linkDisplayName}}
with AngularJS this would be natural, but, I have no idea how this is done in MVC.
Is there a templating library that can be used for this?

Answer 1

1) Create a model to Hold the Links
public class LinkObject
{
public string Link { get; set; }
public string Description { get; set; }
}
2) In your Action you can use ViewBag, ViewData or even pass the list inside you Model. I will show you how to do using ViewBag
public ActionResult MyDynamicView()
{
//Other stuff and code here
ViewBag.LinkList = new List<LinkObject>()
{
new LinkObject{ Link ="http://mylink1.com", Description = "Link 1"},
new LinkObject{ Link ="http://mylink2.com", Description = "Link 2"},
new LinkObject{ Link ="http://mylink3.com", Description = "Link 3"}
};
return View(/*pass the model if you have one*/);
}
3) In the View, just use a loop:
#foreach (var item in (List<LinkObject>)ViewBag.LinkList)
{
#item.Description
}

Answer 2

Just create a manual one for that, no need to do it from a template. For example, in javascript
function groupAnchor(url,display){
var a = document.createElement("a");
a.href = url;
a.className = "list-group-item";
a.target = "_blank";
a.innerHTML = display;
return a;
}
And then use that function to modify your html structure
<div id="anchors"></div>
<script>
document.getElementById("anchors").appendChild(groupAnchor("http://google.com","Google"));
</script>
Your approach to modification will more than likely be more advanced than this, but it demonstrates the concept. If you need these values to come from server side then you could always iterate over a set using #foreach() and issue either the whole html or script calls there -- or, pass the set from the server in as json and then use that in a function which is set up to manage a list of anchors.
To expand on this, it is important to avoid sending html to the view from a razor iteration. The reason being that html constructed by razor will increase the size of the page load, and if this is done in a list it can be a significant increase.
In your action, construct the list of links and then serialize them so they can be passed to the view
public ActionResult ViewWithLinks()
{
var vm = new ViewModel();
vm.Links = Json(LinkSource.ToList()).Data;
//or for a very simple test for proof of concept
var Numbers = Json(Enumerable.Range(0,100).ToList()).Data;
ViewData["numbers"] = Numbers ;
return View(vm);
}
where all you need is an object to hold the links in your view model
public class ViewModel
{
public ICollection<Link> Links { get; set; }
}
public class Link
{
public string text { get; set; }
public string href { get; set; }
}
and then in your view you can consume this json object
var allLinks = #Html.Raw(Json.Encode(Model.Links));
var numbersList = #Html.Raw(Json.Encode(ViewData["linkTest"]));//simple example
Now you can return to the above function in order to place it on the page by working with the array of link objects.
var $holder = $("<div>");
for(var i = 0; i < allLinks.length; i++){
$holder.append(groupAnchor(allLinks[i].href,allLinks[i].text));
}
$("#linkArea").append($holder);
The benefit is that all of this javascript can be cached for your page. It is loaded once and is capable of handling large amounts of links without having to worry about sending excessive html to the client.