Is this ‘active navbar’ solution overengineered? Am I overlooking a way easier way to do this?

So my boss told me that she wants to have the ‘active’ link in the navbar to be highlighted on my .net core project web app. I thought it would be super easy. It has not been super easy.

For any link in the navbar that uses controller actions, I’ve got it covered with this:
I know this is pretty ugly, but it’s a solution I found online that seemed to be the cleanest, and that I sort of understand. This works awesome for the controller/action calls. It looks something like this in my view:
But my problem is that I have a few pages that I used scaffolding to create. That means they are razor pages. One is a asp.identity scaffolding, so it is in areas/pages/identity/etc

The other is just a baseline razor page that I scaffolded in for some simple CRUD operations.
So, because these obviously don’t have controllers/actions associated with them, I went through the debugger to see what I would need to pass in in place of ‘routeAction’ and ‘routeController’ from the above method.

Turns out I need ‘area’ and ‘page’.
So I made a separate method for razor pages. Here it is, take note of the ‘routePage’ and ‘routeArea’ variables.
calling it like this:

I changed ‘RouteValueDictionary‘ to ‘RedirectToPageResult‘ as well. This actually works if i manually type in the URL. the nav item is highlighted. But If I actually CLICK the link, I get a ridiculous URL that looks like this: ‘localhost:5001/Identity/%2FAccount%2FRegister?PageName=%2FAccount%2FRegister&Permanent=False&PreserveMethod=False’

I read that the %2F was happening originally because I’m passing in the ‘/’ character, but I thought that the ‘RedirectToPageResult’ was supposed to properly handle that. I’m super lost right now. any help would be great. I feel like I’m very close…

So what happens if you put something like this in your _Layout.cshtml? I know it’s not C#, but could get the job done. Edit: Some of this would need slight changes for your use – you’re not using nav-tabs for starters – as I pulled that out of something I’m working on at the moment. Hopefully still of some use.

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