Creating a simple “Tile” button in HTML/CSS and as an ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper

If you have worked with SharePoint 2013, you may have noticed a “tile” button. Something that looks like this:

Normal State	On mouse over (hover)

This looks good (at least to me) and I wanted to find a simple way to create such a button. I’m mainly a XAML guy, and can create something like this VERY easily in XAML; and I can reuse this as a single unit, like a button. But with HTML, it’s a little different. To make this a reusable component, I’ll use ASP.NET MVC and make this a HtmlHelper. For this reason, I wanted to build this without JavaScript – it’s easier to create a HtmlHelper with just HTML and CSS.

To start things off, I created a plain HTML/CSS version of the Tile button:

 <div class="tile" style="background:url(‘Pic.jpg'); background-size:200px 200px" >

       <div class="caption" onclick="alert('Hi!');" >

             <p>Some caption</p>

             <p id="description">Some lengthy description that may potentially overflow into two lines</p>

        </div>

 </div>

And the CSS:

 .tile{

     height: 200px;

     width: 200px;

     overflow: hidden;

     background-repeat: no-repeat;

     max-width: 100%;

     text-align: center;

     vertical-align: middle;

     background-size:200px 200px;

 }

 .caption{

     background-color: rgba(50,50,50,0.4);

     overflow: hidden;

     color: #fff;

     font-weight: bold;

     margin: 150px 0px 0px 0px;

     height: 200px;

     width: 200px;

 }

 .caption:hover {

     transition: margin .5s;

     margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px;

     background-color: rgba(50,50,50,0.4);

     cursor: pointer;

 }

 #description{

     overflow: hidden;

     margin: 25px 0px 0px 0px;

 }

I’ve used CSS3 transitions for the smooth animation, and it works beautifully on most modern browsers.

Next, I wanted to make this a reusable control and not leave it as just a bunch of HTML tags that has to be repeated all over.

Creating an ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper

Less talk, more code :D

 public static class MyHelpers

     {

         public static MvcHtmlString TileButton(string backgroundUrl, string jsAction, 

             string caption, string description = "")

         {

             var outerDiv = new TagBuilder("div");

             var captionDiv = new TagBuilder("div");

             var captionP = new TagBuilder("p");

             var descP = new TagBuilder("p");

             outerDiv.AddCssClass("tile");

             //style="background:url('AmarProfilePicSmall.jpg'); 

             //       background-size:200px 200px"

             outerDiv.MergeAttribute("style", 

                 "background:url(" + backgroundUrl + "); background-size:200px 200px");

             captionDiv.AddCssClass("caption");

             descP.AddCssClass("description");

             captionDiv.MergeAttribute("onclick", jsAction);

             captionP.SetInnerText(caption);

             descP.SetInnerText(description);

             captionDiv.InnerHtml = captionP.ToString() + descP.ToString();

             outerDiv.InnerHtml = captionDiv.ToString();

             return new MvcHtmlString(outerDiv.ToString());

         }

     }

The code is pretty simple, so at an overview level, ’m using TagBuilder to create the components that I used in HTML for the tile. I’m going to reuse the same CSS I used earlier, and have copied it to the site.css file in the Content folder in a new ASP.NET MVC project.

And although I could’ve created this as an extension method to the HtmlHelper class, I created this as a static method to start with, so I can use it like this in my views:

@TileButtonSample.Helpers.MyHelpers.TileButton("../Images/AmarProfilePicSmall.jpg",

"alert('Hi');", "Caption", "Some lengthy description")

And, that’s about it! A short post this time – and hopefully simple enough.

If you think this can be improved, please mention what approach you would take to implement this.

Thanks for reading!

Amar

PS: You can follow me on twitter at “_amarnit”, where I share some quick tips/learning at times!