How to make a Asp.Net MVC HtmlHelper that use generic work with Razor

Posted on: 2014-04-17

If you create a Html Helper with Asp.Net MVC that take a generic type, you may stumble into a problem when using it. An error concerning compilation of the page when executing raise with a yellow screen of death.

An exception of type 'System.Web.HttpCompileException' occurred in System.Web.dll but was not handled in user code Compiler Error Message: CS1502: The best overloaded method match for 'System.Web.WebPages.WebPageExecutingBase.Write(System.Web.WebPages.HelperResult)' has some invalid arguments

This code is the result of simply calling this line:

 @Html.Test<ContestListItemViewModel>() //Does not work 

The Html Helper is very simple.

 public static MvcHtmlString Test<TEntityType>(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper) { return new MvcHtmlString("<p>Test</P>"); } 

To make it works, you have to have it inside a Razor statement like this:

 @{ var x = Html.Test<ContestListItemViewModel>(); @Html.Raw(x); } 

The problem is it is not very clean. However, it is possible to fix this with a single line statement if you wrap the Html Helper within parentheses.

 @(Html.Test<ContestListItemViewModel>()) 

How come? Well, Razor become confused if it has to render the result with Html or with C# variable because of the ContestListItemViewModel that is interpreted as Html. Adding parentheses help Razor to generate the Html output and remove the confusion, which remove the error.