Chapter 5 Helpers

sc0ri0n · August 26th, 2013, 08:53 PM

Hi - Love the book so far, found a couple of errors here and there but noticed that they were addressed in the forums.

I may be pedantic but I am not sure I understand the reason for this code:

Code:

@helper Selected(string option, string value){
if(HttpContext.Current.Request[option] != null){
var values = HttpContext.Current.Request[option].Split(',');
if(values.Contains(value)){
<text>selected=\âselected\â</text>
}
}
}

What's the point of selected=\"selected\" there?
When I look into source code I see something like

Code:

<option         selected=\"selected\">

To my knowledge (and that means days from diving into HTML 15+ yrs ago) <option selected> is the right form according to W3C.

So I used the following instead

Code:

        // This seem to work just fine
        //   <text>selected</text> 

        // and this works as well
            @:selected

End result is
<option selected>

Pretty much the same deal with Checked helper.

Am I missing something?

Thanks!

Imar · August 26th, 2013, 09:20 PM

Hi there,

No, you're not missing something. In the old days, selected was just fine. Then in HTML 4, that required all attributes to have a value, selected="selected" was required. However, now with HTML 5, we're back to empty attributes again, so just selected works fine and is valid HTML.

The backslashes to escape the double quotes aren't needed (and are actually a bug in this code). Normally, inside a C# string, you need them or else the double quote would terminate the string prematurely. However, in this example, with the text being inside a pair of <text> tags, you can use double quotes as is without the need to escape them.

So, your solution works perfectly well, as would selected="selected" (since a value on the attribute is still allowed).

Hope this helps,

Imar

sc0ri0n · August 27th, 2013, 07:16 PM

Makes perfect sense, thanks!