When you work with Sitecore MVC you usually also work with Razor as your view engine. To support you in your Razor views, ASP.NET MVC has a number of useful helper methods (e.g. to generate a form). These methods are part of the HtmlHelper class and are invoked with @Html.MethodToCall(). Sitecore has it’s own html helper, available with @Html.Sitecore().MethodToCall(). You may know the following method to output the content of a Sitecore field, including inline editing for the Experience Editor:

@Html.Sitecore().Field("My Field")

Sometimes you need more functionalities and you wish you could extend the Sitecore html helper. I will show you two possibilities how you can easily accomplish this.

Extension methods

The ASP.NET HtmlHelper as well as the SitecoreHelper class are normal classes, what means you can write extension methods for it. So if you want to extends the Sitecore html helper with a custom implementation, you just need to write an extension method for the SitecoreHelper class:

public static MvcHtmlString GetExtensionMethodString(this SitecoreHelper helper)
{
    return new MvcHtmlString("This comes from the extension method!");
}

Which you can call with:

@Html.Sitecore().GetExtensionMethodString()

The benefits are clear: It’s very simple and your co-developers don’t even need to know if this method is a Sitecore extension or your custom code, they can simply use it the same way as it would be a Sitecore helper method.

Custom HtmlHelper

Extension methods have one big disadvantage: You can’t override methods nor can you use protected methods of the “original” html helper. So another possibility is to write a custom html helper the same way as Sitecore does. The goal is to have something we can call like this:

@Html.Custom().MethodToCall()

Also here the concept is very easy. Custom() is an extension method of the ASP.NET HtmlHelper and returns a new instance of our custom html helper, which inherits from the SitecoreHelper. First we need the custom html helper with a new method:

public class CustomSitecoreHelper : SitecoreHelper
{
    public CustomSitecoreHelper(System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper htmlHelper)
        : base(htmlHelper)
    {
    }

    public MvcHtmlString GetCustomHelperString()
    {
        return new MvcHtmlString("This comes from our custom html handler!");
    }
}

In this class it is also possible to use and/or override protected and public methods of the original Sitecore html helper. One useful protected method could be GetValueFromCurrentRendering() or it could make sense to override the FormHandler() for multiple forms handling (see this blog post).

Last but not least we need to write the HtmlHelper extension method to get your custom helper:

public static CustomSitecoreHelper Custom(this System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper htmlHelper)
{
    // get the helper from current thread
    var threadData = ThreadHelper.GetThreadData<CustomSitecoreHelper>();
    if (threadData != null) return threadData;

    // create new helper if needed
    var helper = new CustomSitecoreHelper(htmlHelper);
    ThreadHelper.SetThreadData(helper);
    return helper;
}

Now we are able to use it:

@Html.Custom().GetCustomHelperString()

In theory you are now able to “forget” the Sitecore html helper and always use your custom one. This would have a similar effect to your co-workers like extension methods. Because we inherit from the Sitecore html helper, you can also call it’s method over the custom class:

@Html.Custom().Field("My Field")

How do you handle these situations in your daily business? Do you have a third, even better option? If you have ever tried something like this, what did you experience?