How do I call Url.Action from an HtmlHelper class?

Question

I've used

Url.Action("actionFoo", "controllerBar")

in my Views (aspx). But now I'm refactoring some of my markup to an HtmlHelper I've created.

Problem is I don't seem to have the proper namespaces included or the View has some default object reference that I'm not aware of. Point is the compiler can't find Url.Action.

For simplicity sake here is what I'm trying to do...

public static MvcHtmlString RenderActionButtons(this HtmlHelper helper, string actionName, string controllerName)
{
    TagBuilder customActionButtonTagBuilder = new TagBuilder("a");
    customActionButtonTagBuilder.Attributes.Add(new KeyValuePair<string, string>("href", Url.Action(actionName, controllerName)));
    customActionButtonTagBuilder.InnerHtml = "foo";
    customActionButtonTagBuilder.AddCssClass("custom-action-button");

    return MvcHtmlString.Create(customActionButtonTagBuilder.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal));
}

How do I point my code to the proper usage of Url.Action?

Answer 1

soltion... Url is part of a UrlHelper. You can obtain an instance of the UrlHelper if you have the HtmlHelper as follows...

new UrlHelper(helper.ViewContext.RequestContext)

this is the object that exposes url.Action