Pass Dictionary of routeValues to ActionLink

Question

All,

Getting to grips with ASP.NET MVC. So far, so good, but this one is a little nuts.

I have a view model that contains a dictionary of attributes for a hyperlink, used like this:

menu = model variable

Html.ActionLink(Html.Encode(menu.Name), Html.Encode(menu.Action), Html.Encode(menu.Controller), menu.Attributes, null)

The problem is the position of "menu.Attributes" expects an object in the form:

new  { Name = "Fred", Age=24 }

From what I can tell, this anonymous object is actually converted to a dictionary via reflection anyway BUT you can't pass a dictionary to it in the first place!!!

The Html generated for the link simply shows the dictionary type.

How on earth do I get round this? The whole point is that its general and the controller can have set the menu.Attributes previously....

Based on a post below I tried the following:

Html.ActionLink(Html.Encode(menu.Name), Html.Encode(menu.Action), Html.Encode(menu.Controller), new RouteValueDictionary(menu.Attributes), new Dictionary<string,object>())

but this still doesn't work (I guess the code internally calls the generic method that takes objects?). The above (and my original solution of passing a dictionary to the 4th paramater produces a HTML similar to this:

<a href="/EditRole?Comparer=System.Collections.Generic.GenericEqualityComparer%601%5BSystem.String%5D&amp;Count=1&amp;Keys=System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary%602%2BKeyCollection%5BSystem.String%2CSystem.String%5D&amp;Values=System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary%602%2BValueCollection%5BSystem.String%2CSystem.String%5D">EditDocumentRoles</a>

i.e. it's using reflection and working things out completely wrong...

Answer 1

The suggestions on how to fix worked for me in MVC3. Example usage:

IDictionary<string, object> routeValues = new Dictionary<string, object>();

routeValues.Add("EmployeeID", 1);

@Html.ActionLink("Employee Details", "EmployeeDetails", "Employee", new RouteValueDictionary(routeValues), null);