Two Razor View Errors You Might Recognize

recently, i went back to developing websites with asp.net mvc (after quite some time in spa and web api), and i struggled for some time with some strange razor views' behaviors i couldn’t understand. here are some of them. i hope this post will help you save some time in case you have the same problems.

using generics in razor views

generics’ syntax has a peculiarity that might interfere when writing inline inside html tags: the use of angular brackets. this confuses the razor interpreter so much that it thinks there is a missing closing tag.

for example, when trying to write @model.getpropertyvalue<datetime>(“date”) you’ll get an error and visual studio will show some wiggle with the following alert.

basically, it thinks <datetime> is an html tag and wants you to close it.

the solution is pretty simple: just put everything inside some brackets, like @(model.getpropertyvalue<datetime>(“date”))

order of execution of body and layout views

i wanted to set the current ui culture of my pages with every request, so i wrote a partial view that i included at the top of my layout view: all text in the layout was correctly translated, while the text coming from the body was not.

after some digging, i realized that the order of execution of a razor view starts with the view itself (which renders the body) and then goes on with the layout. so, my uiculture was set after the body was rendered. so, i had to move the partial view that was setting the culture at the top of the "main" view.

if you have many views, just put all initialization code inside a view called _viewstart.cshtml. this way the code is executed before the body is rendered, for every view, and you don’t have to add it to each view manually.

that’s all for now.