Hey gang,

So my knowledge is progressing and I'm at the stage now where I'm trying to DRY my Razor views and could use some advice.

Background: I've got a bunch of nodes (let's call them blog posts) where the editor can set a date or leave it blank. If the editor specifies a date, then I output that in the view, otherwise I make use of the CreateDate property.

Here's the little snippet I'm using to do that:

var postDate = post.HasValue("postDate")
    ? post.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("postDate")
    : post.CreateDate;

I'm using this little snippet all over the place now and so it seem a good candidate for abstracting into its own helper function somewhere. My question is: what would be the best way to do this? Razor helper or some other means? I want to end up being able to do something like this:

var postDate = getPostDate(post, "postDate");

Presumably then I'd be able to use it in situations like this:

var posts = Umbraco.TypedContentAtRoot()
    .First()
    .Descendants()
    .OfTypes("postPage")
    .OrderByDescending(x => x.HasValue("postDate")
        ? x.GetPropertyValue<DateTime>("postDate")
        : x.CreateDate);

It seems a pretty trivial thing, but don't know where to start looking. :)

Many thanks in advance!

Charles