MVC 3 Helper for Hover Images...

In this post, I will talk about something that I haven't found on the internet, which is quite simple to do, which is an MVC Helper for creating a Hover image button... If you are a professional developer and work in a team, you must have people which make the graphical stuff of your website, because most developers (like me) just don't like it, it's just a completely separate job. This code assumes that you already understand MVC. So here are my images, one named OK.png and the other OK_Hover.png, that are located on the Content/Images/Buttons folder. Now what I want do do is to use my helper (which appears on listing 1), to use it in my razor page, and that upon a click will redirect me to the corresponding view. So in my index.cstml, I have:

@using HoverImageHelper.Helpers;
@{
 ViewBag.Title = "Index";
}
Index

@Html.ImageButton("OK", "OK")

So the first parameter corresponds to my PNG file, and the second to my action. Listing 1

/// 
/// This function creates an image button with a hover, based on a an image name (must be .PNG)
/// and its corresponding hover image
/// 
/// 
/// 
/// 
/// 
/// 
public static MvcHtmlString ImageButton
(this HtmlHelper helper, string imageName, string actionName, object routeValues)
 {
 //Gets the action name and routes
 var urlHelper = new UrlHelper(helper.ViewContext.RequestContext);
 var url = urlHelper.Action(actionName, routeValues);
 //Creates the image tag
 var imgTag = new TagBuilder("img");
 var imageUrl = string.Format("/Content/Images/{0}.png", imageName);
 imgTag.Attributes.Add("src", imageUrl);
 imgTag.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "this.src='" + imageUrl.Replace(".", "_hover.") + "'");
 imgTag.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "this.src='" + imageUrl + "'");
 imgTag.Attributes.Add("border", "0");
 //Creates the link tag
 TagBuilder imglink = new TagBuilder("a");
 imglink.MergeAttribute("href", url);
 imglink.InnerHtml = imgTag.ToString(TagRenderMode.SelfClosing);
 return MvcHtmlString.Create(imglink.ToString());
 }

And a corresponding overload (which I use on this example): Listing 2

public static MvcHtmlString ImageButton(this HtmlHelper helper, string imageName, string actionName)
 {
 return ImageButton(helper, imageName, actionName, null);
 } 

Happy programming!!! You can grab the full code here: https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=c80cb697c4b0eb01&resid=C80CB697C4B0EB01!1447&parid=C80CB697C4B0EB01!1446&authkey=!AJ4-nyhDI-I2ur0[^]