Unfortunately there is no built-in overload of this helper that allows you to achieve this.
Fortunately it would take a couple of lines of code to implement your own:
public static class LabelExtensions
{
public static MvcHtmlString LabelFor<TModel, TValue>(
this HtmlHelper<TModel> html,
Expression<Func<TModel, TValue>> expression,
object htmlAttributes
)
{
return LabelHelper(
html,
ModelMetadata.FromLambdaExpression(expression, html.ViewData),
ExpressionHelper.GetExpressionText(expression),
htmlAttributes
);
}
private static MvcHtmlString LabelHelper(
HtmlHelper html,
ModelMetadata metadata,
string htmlFieldName,
object htmlAttributes
)
{
string resolvedLabelText = metadata.DisplayName ?? metadata.PropertyName ?? htmlFieldName.Split('.').Last();
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(resolvedLabelText))
{
return MvcHtmlString.Empty;
}
TagBuilder tag = new TagBuilder("label");
tag.Attributes.Add("for", TagBuilder.CreateSanitizedId(html.ViewContext.ViewData.TemplateInfo.GetFullHtmlFieldName(htmlFieldName)));
tag.MergeAttributes(new RouteValueDictionary(htmlAttributes));
tag.SetInnerText(resolvedLabelText);
return MvcHtmlString.Create(tag.ToString(TagRenderMode.Normal));
}
}
and once brought into scope use this helper in your view:
@Html.LabelFor(m => m.Foo, new { id = "Foo" })
@Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.Foo)
Remark: because now it is up to you to manage HTML ids, make sure that they are unique throughout the entire document.
Remark2: I have shamelessly plagiarized and modified the LabelHelper
method from the ASP.NET MVC 3 source code.