I am growing increasingly frustrated with Umbraco. I've been working on an Umbraco project for a little while now and I have been unable to figure out how to solve my problem (one of many).
Scenario - I have a content managed page and on this page users can search for things (these things come from an entirely different database to Umbraco). This is fine, I've created a child action which loads the form for search and created the controller method which returns the results. However, each result I need to link to another content managed page (the same content managed page for each result) that takes an ID so I can inject some dynamic data into the content managed page.
Great, I've got a method for handling this request in my surface controller and I can create an Html.ActionLink for each result that when clicked hits my controller action with the id parameter.
Problem - When each link is clicked the url that gets hit is
http://localhost:5645/umbraco/surface/{controllername}/{actionname}/?id={id}
However this request is outside the Umbraco context, so when I try to return any page with the following controller code, I get the following error:
[ActionName("ShowDetials")]
public ActionResult GetProperty(int propertyId)
{
return View("~/Views/TestView.cshtml");
}
Cannot render a macro when UmbracoContext.PageId is null.
So my initial thoughts were to have a separate controller which inherits from Umbraco.Web.Mvc.RenderMvcController and try to handle the request in there, but then this raises other issues like being unable to use #Html.ActionLink to link to a RenderMvcController, I also don't want to have two controllers to handle content from the same section.
The other issues I have is passing custom models to the view.
If anyone can help me, I would be eternally grateful.
For any developer having this same issue the only way I have been able to solve it is by having two controllers. A surface controller to handle the initial rendering of the search form and page and to display the results of the search, then a separate rendermvccontroller to handle clicking on an individual result and displaying a 'details' page.
However, this in my opinion isn't great and I would still greatly appreciate it if anyone has another solution.
Related
I'm fairly new to MVC and I hope someone can spare some time to point me in the right direction. I was given a school assignment to create a simple wiki page where a user can search for and create articles. So I have a main index page where I have a zone for the menu, another one for the table of contents, a welcome message, and a search box for an article.
One important directive I have is to implement my own routing (without modifying the RouteConfig.cs file). Each of the following requests must call the right action method in my controller:
/ or /home or home/index: displays the welcome page;
home/index/<title of article>: displays the article;
home/index/<inexisting title>: invitation to create the article;
home/modify/title: modify the article;
home/add/title: add an article;
home/delete/title: delete the article.
For now, I have a basic HomeController with an ActionResult Index() method that returns the index view, but I am a bit stumped as to how to properly get started and the next methods I should be creating to respond to these requests, most notably, how I go about passing on the specified parameters to these controller methods.
I would appreciate any advice to kick start things.
-Jeff
I'm working on a site that has routes to actions which render Partial Views. A lot of these partial views are components which together make up a complete page.
For instance on a search page I'm working on has a text box, a list of tabs, and a Table.
Seach of these can be accessed with a URL similar to
/Search/SearchPanel
/Search/Tabs/{SearchTerm}
/Search/ResultsTable/SearchTerm?tab=[currently selected tab]
and these are all rendered on with a RenderPartial on my Index page.
When the page loads, it will display each of these components the way I want it. But at the moment there's nothing stopping a user from going directly to the url
/Search/Tabs
to render only a tab control which is meaningless outside the context of the rest of the elements on the page.
Is there a way for me to prevent this?
Have you tried marking your Controller method as private?
private PartialViewResult MyPartialResultMethod()
This should allow you to call it from within your code to build up your pages and disallow any public access such as through a URl.
I'm testing this now to make doubly sure my answer is correct so I'll update as I test.
In your tabs example you could simply restrict access by using a second controller method for Tabs that's private.
So you'd have something that looks like:
public ActionResult Tabs(string searchTerm) // When a search term is passed.
and
private ActionResult Tabs() // When no search term is passed.
You could create an ActionFilter which checks if the Request.IsAjaxRequest() is true. If it's not (meaning the user is calling the view directly), re-direct accordingly.
We are beginning the process of moving from Web Forms to MVC for all of our new applications. I am working on porting our Master Page over and am trying to satisfy the requirements that we need a single master page to be used by all applications. The primary navigation for the application needs to be in a menu within the master page. Accomplishing this was easy, the hard part is that each application may need to determine what to display in the menu using a unique set of rules. Some apps can simply say, here's the menu structure to use via something like a SiteMap. Others need to determine what is displayed in the menu based on what roles the user has, this can also be handled easily with a SiteMap. The situation that I'm struggling with is that some apps need to generate the menus based on the roles the user has, but also on the data on which they are working. i.e. The same user may have different option in the menu for a page if they are working on object 'foo' than they do if working on object 'bar'.
What I've done at this point, is I've created an HtmlHelper that is called by the master page view and takes a list of objects of a custom type and returns an unordered list that is styled by a jQuery plugin to display the menu. The list of objects the helper method takes are passed to the view using the ViewData dictionary. Currently, the value of this ViewData node is set within the constructor of each controller. This allows each page, and potentially each method, to set a different menu without having to set the value in each action method, unless its needed. I have also created a class that parses a SiteMap and returns the list of items needed to build the menu. This class is what I'm using to set the ViewData value in the controller. The idea being that if an application needed more control of how the menu data was generated, they could create their own class to generate the data as long as it returns a list of the correct type of objects.
This solution seems to work fine so far, it just doesn't 'feel' right for some reason. I'm hoping that I can either get some ideas of better way to do this or some reassurance that this is a valid approach to solving this problem.
If it is something that will be on every page, do something like this:
Create a base controller:
public class MyBaseController : Controller
Have this controller get the data it needs and send that data in the ViewData["menu"] to the View. Then have all your controllers inherit from this one:
public class HomeController : MyBaseController
In the Master Page, loop through your ViewData and create your menu.
(I did something like this for my sub-menu which displayed a list of categories.)
In the book I am reading (Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Apress) they use Html.RenderAction for the menu in the masterpage. I am a Asp.net MVC novice so maybe somebody else can give more info about this.
You can download the sourcecode at apress.com though so maybe that could help.
Take the example of wanting to have a "Latest news items" sidebar on every page of your ASP.NET MVC web site. I have a NewsItemController which is fine for pages dedicating their attention to NewsItems. What about having a news sidebar appear on the HomeController for the home page though? Or any other controller for that matter?
My first instinct is to put the logic for selecting top 5 NewsItems in a user control which is then called in the Master Page. That way every page gets a news sidebar without having to contaminate any of the other controllers with NewsItem logic. This then means putting logic in what I understood to be the presentation layer which would normally go in a Controller.
I can think of about half a dozen different ways to approach it but none of them seem 'right' in terms of separation of concerns and other related buzz-words.
I think you should consider putting it in your master page. Your controller can gather data (asynchronously, of course), store it in a nice ViewModel property for your view (or in TempData) and then you can call RenderPartial() in your master page to render the data.
The keeps everything "separate"
http://eduncan911.com/blog/html-renderaction-for-asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx
This seems to address the question - even using the instance of a sidebar - but using a feature not included with MVC 1 by default.
http://blogs.intesoft.net/post/2009/02/renderaction-versus-renderpartial-aspnet-mvc.aspx
This also indicates the answer lies in RenderAction.
For anyone else interested, here's how I ended up doing it. Note you'll need to the MVC Futures assembly for RenderAction.
Basically you'd have something like this in your controller:
public class PostController
{
//...
public ActionResult SidebarBox()
{
// I use a repository pattern to get records
// Just replace it with whatever you use
return View(repoArticles.GetAllArticles().Take(5).ToList());
}
//...
}
Then create a partial view for SidebarBox with the content you want displayed, and in your Master Page (or wherever you want to display it) you'd use:
<% Html.RenderAction<PostController>(c => c.SidebarBox()); %>
Not so hard after all.
You can create a user control (.ascx) and then call RenderPartial().
Design a method in your controller with JsonResult as return type. Use it along with jQuery.
Use RenderAction() as suggested by elsewhere.
News section with ASP.NET MVC
I'm guessing the StackOverflow code has something along the lines of a UsersController that defines a function like this:
public ActionResult Profile(string id, string username, string sort)
{
}
From what I can tell, there's two ways to go about implementing the Profile function. One is to use a switch statement on the sort parameter and render a different view based on what is being displayed (e.g. stats, recent, responses). These views would then render a partial user control to handle the display of the top half of the profile page (gravatar, username, last seen, etc).
The other way I could see implementing this would be to always render one view and have the logic for showing / hiding its different sections based on the sort. This would lead to a pretty monstrous view page, but it should work as well.
Are there any other ways of implementing the StackOverflow profile page that I'm missing? The reason I ask is because my current ASP.NET MVC page has a similar profile page and I want to make sure I'm not going about this the wrong way.
Personally, I would create an action and view for each tab section and use a partial view for the top part that is shared across the others. I'm just getting started with MVC though, so I don't have a lot of experience to back up that suggestion.
The URL route scheme I would use is /{controller}/{id}/{section} e.g. /users/123/recent /users/123/responses, etc.
You could build the view name from the sort value
<% RenderPartial(sort + "View") %>
However, it does default back to the stats view if the parameter doesn't exist so I don't think they are doing that.
A switch on sort would probably work just fine with the default on the switch going back to the stats view.