Adding images within Html.ActionLink

Question

I was trying to create an option to switch between a list view and widget view in ASP.net MVC (with razor view engine).

However, I am having some trouble trying to both

Answer 1

The reason this code did not work:

@Html.ActionLink("List View", "listView", new { @style = "background-image:url('~/Content/Images/listIcon.png')" },null)

was because the 3rd parameter of @Html.ActionLink is to add additional route values. If you want to add more HTML attributes, you need to use:

@Html.ActionLink("List View", "listView", null, new { @style = "background-image:url('~/Content/Images/listIcon.png')" })

Additionally, like others have said, you can't use the ~.

Note that inline styles are generally frowned upon, as the best practice would be to create a CSS class that contains your background-image and add the class as the HTML attribute instead, but @style would functionally work here as well. More info on why inline styles are bad can be found here: What's so bad about in-line CSS?