For a long time a small thing in writing Razor code for Sitecore (and in some other places) has irritated me. It's not really very important, but with the new version of C# there is finally a way to round off this rough edge that's been getting to me...
What was the issue?
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There are various places in the .Net world where Microsoft built a thing and we get to extend it. One of these places is in ASP.Net's
Html
object, which exposes a bunch of useful helpers for web programming. But in quite a few places (like Sitecore renderings) products and tools have added extra features this using
Extension Methods. For example, displaying a Sitecore field in a rendering can look like:
<h1>
@Html.Sitecore().Field("Title")
</h1>
And here's the thing that's irritated me: When you write an add-on like
Sitecore()
here, in the past this
had to be a method
- and hence the need for
()
on the end of the name.
That's because until now, the compiler only supported methods that acted as extensions to a someone else's object. So you'd declare that Sitecore extension something like:
public static SitecoreExtensions
{
public static SitecoreExtensionClass Sitecore(this IHtmlHelper helper)
{
// return your custom helper object
}
}
And the compiler understands it can extend ASP.Net's
Html
helper object to return the custom Sitecore code for you. It can re-write the code behind the scenes so that your method gets called passing in the HTML Helper object that Microsoft provide.
But the need to make the extension here a method rather than a property has always looked a bit wrong in my mind.
How can we do that better?
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But the new v14 release for C# (Available with previews of .Net 10) has a new and more flexible way to declare extensions. You can still declare extension methods, but also now you can write extension properties.
The syntax is a bit different because there's no natural way to pass the equivalent of the
this
parameter into a property, but in future it will be possible to declare helpers like the Razor add-on above more like this:
public static SitecoreExtensions
{
extension(IHtmlHelper helper)
{
public SitecoreExtensionClass Sitecore
{
get
{
// return your custom helper object
}
}
}
}
And now because it's declared as an extension property there's no need for that extra
()
and your Razor code can become:
<h1>
@Html.Sitecore.Field("Title")
</h1>
To me at least, that looks better.
Shame it won't work on your old DXP code - but maybe the .Net headless codebase might adopt it in future?
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