I am not to relate to Areas in MVC, why cannot we have simple folders to indicate modules, is the web.config which needs to be there, the below is the reason why i am asking this
Views -unfortunately for views it’s not possible. All the views must be placed inside “~/Views/ControllerName” or “~/Views/Shared” folder.
The following article describes in detail the reasons for Areas and the difference between Areas and folder-based conventions in ASP.NET MVC.
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_asp/mvc/article.php/c20227/Using-Areas-in-ASPNET-MVC-Application.htm
The essential idea is contained in the Introduction of the article:
ASP.NET MVC relies on certain folder and class naming conventions to
organize models, views and controllers. A large application often
consists of functionally independent modules with the result that the
main application is essentially a bundle of these sub-applications. In
such cases, organizing various models, views and controllers can be
tedious. Luckily, ASP.NET MVC allows you to split your application
into what is known as Areas. Each area mimics the folder structure and
conventions as required by ASP.NET MVC. This article shows you how
Areas are used in an ASP.NET MVC application.
When someone is trying to develop a sub-module suitable for inclusion in any ASP.NET MVC application (as an example, think deployment/inclusion of 3rd party code via a NUGET package) then the Areas construct is very helpful, and arguably a necessity.
Areas are folder structure which contains its independent set of Controller,
View, Model. Consider we are creating an area called Admin then the folder structure for the Admin area will be,
The same setup can be created by adding folders, Subfolder, and Required files.
Related
How can I go about separating my MVC project into UI specific (JS, CSS, Images, Fonts, and maybe Views) and Controller/Model specific (Controllers, Helpers, Models, and may be Views). Since our front-end developers work mostly independent of Visual Studio, I was looking for best practices in separating projects. Any pointers or sample projects?
This is how we finally ended up doing it.
Create a separate visual studio project called SolutionName.Client (this is where all frontend js and scss files go)
Create you MVC project called SolutionName.MVC (this is the asp.net mvc project)
Using Grunt.JS write tasks that compiles all js and css files and drops them to SoltuionName.MVC/Content folder
Similarly write tasks that drops all Views (razor files) into SolutionName.MVC/Views folder.
In Project build settings, add a pre-build tasks to run grunt task.
This setup took few hours to get it working but it is now quite useful.
You can easily do this and I've done it for each of my projects in MVC as well.
One project has your Controllers, ViewModels, and in my case, any custom logic related to Dependency Resolution for MVC and custom classes related to security authentication with MVC. Basically any code that touches the MVC framework core and is not involved in rendering content.
The other one has pretty much everything that you use on the client-side, and code needed for the front end. Which in my case, code-wise, is very minimalist and included some code for Glimpse and Elmah. The rest is your Views, Styles, Scripts, static content like downloads, etc.
As for the files in App_Start, My views project has Bundles, Filters, and obviously any HtmlHelpers you may have, custom css transformationslike for LESS.
My Controller's App_Start has the RouteConfig. These aren't necessarily critical it's just the way I ended up organizing mine and really depends what aspects you need access to during the startup of those components.
I will say that to save yourself time, in your Views/web.config file, add a namespace entry for your Company.Project.ViewModels namespace so that it's done in one place and you don't have to add it to each view, as this namespace would reside in your Controllers Project.
Your project with the Views will be your startup project. Just make sure in the global.asax your calls to the FilterConfig, RouteConfig and BundleConfig all resolve correctly.
It's fairly easy to do, my recommendation is to try it yourself and split it out the way you want and if you have problems come back and ask about the difficulties rather than looking for a step by step guide.
Bottom line is, yes it's possible and yes it works,
I'm looking at this MVC WebApi starter kit (for Angular/TypeScript)
Ignoring all the client side code, I noticed the author has made a WebApi that is extremely bare bones. Has has taken out most scaffolding including _ViewStart.cshtml, _Layout.cshtml, and forgoed the convention of controllers in Controllers folder and views in View folder under subdirectory with same name of controller, etc.
He added some interesting Routing and Validation classes that I havent seen before in a Core folder and put controllers in Api folder and Views directly into Views folder with an Index.cshtml at the root.
It's very clean and barebone project structure for a standalone web api that will do nothing except serve data to a client heavy application. I kind of like it this way but before jumping ship I'm wondering what drawbacks this approach has and if I'm actually giving up any core features of the framework by doing it this way. For example, clearly MVC Areas are being given up here in favor of flexibility to create your own view folders structure and seperation of application sections (I'm okay with getting rid of MVC Areas I rarely used them anyways). Another thing is I don't think a Controller action method can return View() and it will find it in the Views folder by convention of the controller name. I'm also okay with that since I will only be serving JSON data and will use 100% client side templating.
Are there any other core features that are being abandoned that I'm missing that may make me regret going with this project structure?
When I create Web APIs that are hosted in IIS, the only files in my web application are web.config, global.asax and global.asax.cs. Everything else is not required.
Take a look at this template if you haven't already before you decide how to structure your ASP.Net MVC / Angular project:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/5af151b2-9ed2-4809-bfe8-27566bfe7d83
You can always add components into your project later, so I wouldn't seat it too much. I like to start with a lean/mostly empty project first and add things myself so that I fully understand what I'm adding.
We have graphic/interface designer who is developing html/css for our websites.
How can I let him work on cshtml and css files without giving him access to controllers and models?
Greetings
Why not separate the Controller and Models into separate Class Library projects, referenced by the MVC project? That way, you can expose the MVC project, including the views, styles and scripts, but keep the infrastructure private.
So long as you keep the naming convention correct, you shouldn't have any issue with controllers being separate.
Here is what I want to achieve, I want to separate AREAs of ASP.NET MVC as pure single DLL.
Blog.DLL
Forums.DLL
FAQ.DLL
Each of them are individual ASP.NET MVC Area, with its own default CSHTML or ASPX pages. Installing, migrating and maintaining lots of pages including resources, javascripts and so on are real pain for long run. As most of these will hardly change.
My final website will be like this.
\MvcApplication
\bin
\MvcApplication.bin
\Blog.dll
\Forums.dll
\Controllers
\..
\Models
\..
\Views
\..
\Global.asax
\Web.config
Without adding any thing, just dropping Blog.dll, my application should support /blog and all its pages. If I want to customize something, than I can add area, and add only cshtml pages..
\MvcApplication
\bin
\MvcApplication.bin
\Blog.dll
\Forums.dll
\Areas
\Blog
\Views
\Shared
\BlogLayout.cshtml <-- this will override the look
\Controllers
\..
\Models
\..
\Views
\..
\Global.asax
\Web.config
This will help in reusing ASP.NET Area Plugins, by simply dropping the dll in bin folder. However web.config may require some changes, but most likely we will save configure values in database and only thing needed will be "Entity Framework connection string" in web.config.
My challenges (Questions)
Is it possible? It sure looks to me, but will there be any reflection/permission issues?
How do I include cshtml/aspx views within one DLL? Probably compiled versions? I have seen couple of text template based View Engines on codeplex but I am little confused on how to actually use them.
And how do I get ViewEngine to first check if physical directory file exists or not and then look into cshtml/aspx within the dll itself as resource file?
You may take a look at the following article which illustrates how a custom VirtualPathProvider could be used in order to retrieve Razor views that are embedded into separate assemblies as resources.
Maybe worth looking at portable areas from mvccontrib. I haven't used them since MVC 2, but found the following SO question by someone having some problems using them with MVC 3, with some possible solutions: ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor Views, and Portable Areas
MvcCodeRouting supports what you want, plus many other cool stuff. Check out this post about ASP.NET MVC Plugins.
I've got the following project setup
Project A (main)
Business
Data
View (asp.net mvc 3 project)
Project N
Business
Data
View (asp.net mvc 3 project)
How can I call from Project A the View in Project N and from N back to A. Essentially what I'm trying to do is package each Project N to have its own individual MVC as it comes from different sources and plug it in to the main project and then just have it navigate to the correct view.
Can this be done? Or is there a better way to do this?
You could write a custom virtual path provider. Here's a nice blog post which shows an example of such a virtual path provider allowing you to embed Razor views into assemblies as resources and reusing them in multiple applications.
Unfortunately without a custom virtual path provider, you cannot cross reference views between multiple ASP.NET MVC applications. This simply is not allowed by the default provider which looks for views only inside the current application.
I do sugest another approach if possible. if I understood correctly, those projects are somehow ike plugins but they are not standalone applications.Also they now about each others so they are coupled. It's, let's say tricky, but I would use only 1 asp.net mvc project (the web ui). All the UI bits which belong to other projects I'd make them helpers (pretty much widgets). This means, that each project contains only the helpers which will be used to construct a view.
I think it's a bit of an architectural problem if you only want to keep the views in each project just for the sake of hosting them in a different assembly. Going the widgets' way it might seem mkore work, but I think you gain the most control and the separation level you want. The only thing is you don't have full Views defined, but why you would want to have full Views (partials, layouts) in separate places if they will be used in one place only?!
Now, if each project is indeed a plugin, independent of other plugins, then going with compiled views is the best way. But if Project B knows about the view of Project N, then I think the above solution is more suitable. That or the whole app is too over engineered. Separation is good when it doesn't create a whole new jungle to navigate it.