Razor HTML Conditional Output - razor

Question

I have a list of items I want to output as the contents of a main (the main in not included below). Each Item has 3 attributes: a Section Name, a Label and a Value. Each item is enclosed in a and everytime the Section Name changes I have to open a (and close the previous one, if any). I'm using a Razor view with this code:
#foreach (LocalStorageItem lsi in Model) {
string fld_name = "f_" + lsi.ItemName;
if (lsi.SectionName != sn) {
if (sn != "") {
Html.Raw("</fieldset>");
}
sn = lsi.SectionName;
<h2>#sn</h2>
Html.Raw("<fieldset>");
}
<div class="row">
<div class="ls_label">#lsi.ItemName</div>
<div class="ls_content" name="#fld_name" id="#fld_name">.</div>
</div>
}
#if (Model.Count != 0) {
Html.Raw("</fieldset>");
}
The problem is: each time the Section Name changes no fieldset tag (open and/or close) is generated. Where am I wrong? If I don't use Html.Raw (or #: as an alternative) the VS2010 parser signals an error.

Answer 1

Calling Html.Raw returns an IHtmlString; it doesn't write anything to the page.
Instead, you should write
#:</fieldset>
Using #: forces Razor to treat it as plain text, so it doesn't need to be well-formed.
However, your code can be made much cleaner by calling GroupBy and making a nested foreach loop.

Answer 2

I really think that the use of #: to work around such code is an abuse of that escape sequence. The problem should be addressed instead by correctly refactoring the code so that balanced tags can be easily written:
#foreach(var section in Model.GroupBy(i => i.SectionName)) {
<h2>#section.Key</h2>
<fieldset>
#foreach(LocalStorageItem lsi in section) {
string fld_name = "f_" + lsi.ItemName;
<div class="row">
<div class="ls_label">#lsi.ItemName</div>
<div class="ls_content" name="#fld_name" id="#fld_name">.</div>
</div>
}
</fieldset>
}
12 lines of code instead of 18