Is hardcoding a default nopic image in my MvcHelperExtension bad design

Question

I've just written an MVC helper method to write img tags for me, in the method I'm hardcoding a nopic image that should be used when no image path is passed in. I don't like the hardcoding but don't know what the best approach I could use (given this is MVC and this is a helper) to achieve it would be.

public static MvcHtmlString Image(this HtmlHelper htmlHelper, 
                                  string imgName, string alt, int height)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(imgName)) imgName = "nopic.jpg";
    var src = String.Format("/Content/ProductImages/{0}", imgName);

    var tagBuilder = new TagBuilder("img");
    tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("src", htmlHelper.Encode(src));
    tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("alt", htmlHelper.Encode(alt));
    tagBuilder.Attributes.Add("height", htmlHelper.Encode(height));

    return MvcHtmlString.Create(tagBuilder.ToString(TagRenderMode.SelfClosing));
}

You could store in your web.config file – Tommy Mar 15 '13 at 14:41 — Tommy, Mar 15 '13 at 14:41

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:41

I thing hard coding in programming is bad think because maintenance is so hard you can add key in web config and get it easy and if need too change it you can change it easy without publish again In web config:

<add key="ImagePath" value="/Content/ProductImages/"/>

In c# code:

var path= WebConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ImagePath"].ToString()

Is hardcoding a default nopic image in my MvcHelperExtension bad design

1 Answers1