I'm the client-side guy at my job and for the web application we're building I am introducing some new JS libs besides the already residing jQuery and jQuery UI. We use the standard folder structure setup with CSS and images in ~/Content and JS in ~/Scripts. In the latter we have our internally developed libs categorized into subfolders such as ~/Scripts/Plugins.
However, now I want to add i.e. TinyMCE and find myself confused. NuGet installs all TinyMCE-related files to ~/Scripts/tinymce, but tinymce/skins holds CSS and images which I feel should not be contained in the ~/Scripts folder.
What is the proper way to structure vendor libs within the MVC file structure? Or, if there is no proper way, is there a proposed best practice? I don't feel like * up the original neat structure too much. Note that I am not looking for creating bundles, that lies in the future and the on-disk structure is a separate concern.
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I am just new to MVC, we are building a massive system and have alot of namespacing in our site.
Where is the standard place to store files (CSS, Images, .JS) etc?
Would it be good to put them under the Content folder in sub-folders to their namespace or drop them in with their respective parent files or both.
The default project structure includes a Content folder for CSS files and a Scripts folder for JavaScript files. A lot of people use this existing template, especially since a lot of Nuget projects may rely on this.
I personally like to put all of the content in a Content folder, and have a subfolder under this named Css and Scripts. It's really a matter of preference though. Do whatever is consistent and well-organized. That will be the key to making the application more easily maintainable.
Its better to put it in saparate folder as Script(js file) at root level.
Add sub folder in content folder for Images and Css etc.
we can also create multiple controller and views for each section of your project.
like for login section you can add Authentication Controller.
we can also use Helper class for adding general function and use it in every where.
you can see following link
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd410120(v=vs.100).aspx
I have an MVC 4.5 project that has most of the UI logic organized in jQuery plugins. I want to protect my code by minification and bundling (While I understand that minification will only do so much as far as protection, it's better than leaving formatted and documented source files on the server.)
Ideally, I want my dev server to work as is -- files are non-minified and separated. But, when I deploy to the production server, I want the source files to be removed and only minified bundles to be available. Also note, on many occasions my jQuery plugins load other plugins from JavaScript code (I use head.js), so I cannot use #Script.Render for that.
What technologies do I use -- built-in MVC bundling, SquishIt, Bundler or do I need to resort to MSBuild and Microsoft Axaj Minifier? To recap, I want to remove source JS files and just be left with minified bundles in production, and, preferably, find a way to not change head.js references based on whether files are minified or not.
Thanks for your advice.
Just thought I respond with what I ended up doing here:
To recap: I wanted to obfuscate my source files with minification while not exposing the source JS files in production. I also wanted for head.js to resolve source file URLs to bundle URLs:
Put all non-minified javascript files in a folder viewable only to Admin role
Used bundling built-in to ASP.NET MVC 4.5 to generate bundles
Pointed my head.js tag to an MVC controller that returned head.js code + a javascript array with an x-ref between raw URLs and bundle URLs (available from BundleTable static object)
Bundling occurs outside of ASP.NET membership, so bundles are generated and available to anonymous users even though the source files are in the folder only accessible by Admin. Then, the trick of dynamically augmenting head.js code with server-side generated bundle URLs takes care of calling bundles from JS files.
I see that ASP.NET MVC generates a Content folder by default, which stores the site.css file. I have a site that uses some image files and XML files in order to do its job, yet I do not want to have those files as embedded resources. Should I just put the files in the solution within the content folder? Should I turn off the "Do not copy" build option on each resource since I will need to deploy the files to the website? Or should these files not even live in the solution and be loaded from the file system?
It's a good approach to add all your files/resources to the solution (at least you can see them in VS ;-) Other developers won't be surprised that your solution really needs some other files.
If those files are the 'content' of your website (like css files) then you can store them in the Content folder. It is up to you what folder structure you come up with. For example you might want to store your images in folder related to the modules of your application, or just all in the images folder. MVC doesn't enforce any particular way of keeping your resource files.
Just leave the Build Action set to Content and Copy to Output Directory to 'Do not copy'.
You might want to take a look at T4MVC project (also available as NuGet package) which will help you in keeping urls to your images / files compile-time safe.
When creating an empty MVC 2 project, I have a lot of javascript files in my Scripts folder. Why? Will removing them affect my application?
No removing them won't affect anything, unless they are being used in pages. However you said this is an empty MVC project so you'll be fine.
They're there for you to use, to make your life easier. For example, JQuery is included.
Take for example JQuery file, It provieds functions which has solutions for crossbrowser related issues which makes developement easy. Similarly other files has functions whcih are providing readymade functionalities which can be used for rapid developement.
Unfortunatly as JS is traveling to browsers its downloaded on the client. Its suprising for not JS people as its not like .NET api where one or more dll is sufficient for all the api and developer dont have to worry(some times :)) about from where they are coming.
I will suggest you to study included JS files and include/use only those which you really wanted to use.
Out curiosity I was wondering if there was a logical reason to have the Scripts folder not a sub folder of the Contents folder in an ASP.NET MVC project. The Contents folder typically contains your style sheets and images and for some reason it would seem natural to me to also include the Scripts folder in there as well.
Possibly because scripts could be denoted as providing more functionality than style and design items, so it could be considered a portion of your business logic.
The scripts and content folders are containers for client-side consumed files. They don't affect your MVC applications in any way. You can rename and move them around as you see fit, provided you update the URL references to them to point to the new path.
Having said that, I personally tend to rename these to js and css mostly because this makes my URLs shorter and easier to read and understand.