As I understand one of the benefits of the MVC pattern is being able to substitute other Views without having to change the Model or Controller.
Since the Razor view engine compiles the views, how can I change or tweak the views after they have been deployed without having to re-deploy the application?
Razor views are compiled dynamically at runtime when they are requested by the ASP.NET runtime. You could replace your .cshtml/.vbhtml files directly on your webserver and the changes will be automatically picked up.
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I have a WebAPI/MVC app which loads separate plugin assemblies with embedded controllers and views and puts them into the MVC PartManager. This works fine but now I'd like to be able to swap these parts out in runtime without restarting the server. I can use PartManager.Remove on the old part and Add with a new part, but this does not seem to be enough. When calling the controller I still get a response from the old controller in the old part.
Apart from adding parts in the PartManager I also add a EmbeddedFileProvider into the RazorViewEngineOptions on Configure because just adding an AssemblyPart does not seem to be enough for the Razor engine to find the view (not sure I'm doing this right). But I don't know if I can replace this Razor-fileprovider in runtime? I have not found a way.
Anyway, what is the preferred way of doing all this, I mean loading/replacing dlls with controllers, views and static resources. Am I on the right track even?
i think that Razor view engines are configured once only, so you cannot change them later.
What you can do is to
have multiple view engines running,
choose between them based on the URL (as in your case - you want to use a different engine for the one controller).
This is described in CUSTOMMOBILEVIEWENGINE section of Scott Hanselsman's blog post. What he was doing was to use different view engines for different devices, but you can adapt the technique for your own purposes.
ok, i know there are a lot of posts online that specify how to do iterations with MVC.
my question is slightly different. when i used to do iterations using WebForms, i was creating one thing only and finishing that one thing till the end which was including the deployment on production.
for example, i was creating a webpage and deploying it, then i create the second page and deploy it. so .dll files were added to my bin folder while the previous dlls remain untouched. at the other hand, when i was making a change latter on, there was this one file that needed to be replaced on production.
now here is the question, how can i acheive the same thing in mvc? beause it just doesn't deploy each page into an individual dll. each time that i add something i have to redeploy the application dll which is not really wise! i played around with deployment options in visual studio but no luck!
There is nothing preventing you from putting controllers and other code in separate assemblies and dropping them in an existing application. Like any ASP.NET based application an MVC application will automatically restart if you add or modify any file in the bin folder or modify web.config.
If you're using Razor you can use RazorGenerator to generate code for your views and compile them into the same assembly.
You may need to write some additional logic though to get routes, model binders etc. wired up correctly.
For a more structures approach to compose the application of separate modules, you may want to look into portable areas. This is an extension to ASP.NET MVC that allows you to package the entire module (including views, css, js etc.) into a single assembly.
First thing, you have to work on the title of the post, it does not match the content of the post.
In asp.net mvc u can choose to deploy only what changed. I.e. If you only changed the .cshtml file, then you can just replace it with the file in production. However if you change any controller class (C#/Vb code), then you will have to upload the web project dll file too so that this new changes are available in the production env
Within the project I'm using this code #Html.Partial("../ReferenceChangeLog/ReferenceChangeLogPopUp") for calling the controller and action.
Here ReferenceChangeLog is Controller Name. ReferenceChangeLogPopUp(ReferenceChangeLogPopUp.cshtml) is Partial View Name.
How can I set the path for calling another project's controller and action ?
That's not supported out of the box. By default Razor views are only resolved within the current project which is what you deploy as an ASP.NET application in IIS. If you need to implement this, you will have to write a custom Razor view engine capable of retrieving views from arbitrary locations on the file system. Here's, for example, an article which explains how you could embed Razor views into assemblies and reuse them across multiple projects.
Initial sidenote: I'm working on a hybrid WebForms+MVC application that started as a WebForms application hence I've added project GUIDs that converted it to MVC. This means that I'm getting context menus directly on Controllers and Views folder in application root. That works.
I was wondering whether it's possible to convince Visual Studio (and Asp.net MVC tooling) to add Add controller... and Add View... context menu items to other folders not just those default ones that are on the project root?
The reason is that I'm working on an Asp.net WebForms application that is now a hybrid with MVC. And since it already has quite a few folders in root I would rather separate the new MVC part and contain it altogether within mvc folder, so all MVC related files would be inside that particular folder.
But right clicking on mvc\Controllers doesn't give me the wizard, nor does the mvc\Views... Also navigation from controller code to views isn't working...
Is there any way to customize this in Visual Studio? Do Asp.net MVC tools for VS have some sort of configuration file where this can be configured? Or in registry maybe?
If you wish to separate the MVC stuff from the rest of the application you might want to put it in a separate Area.
You'd have the context menu and separation from the existing mess.
i have a solution with the following two projects - MyNamespace.Services and MyNamespace.Web.
Web contains a MVC web application.
In the Service project i have a EmailService class that takes care of sending out emails to the user.
I want to use either a partial or a view (ascx or aspx) for email templates.
I have found several solutions on how to render a partial view and get the result as a string which works fine if the template is inside the web project (as it is a controller in the web project that calls the email service).
(the 2 methods i am trying to use is either http://developersisland.blogspot.com/2009/01/renderpartial-to-string-in-aspnet-mvc.html (at the bottom of the blog) or http://www.brightmix.com/blog/how-to-renderpartial-to-string-in-asp-net-mvc/)
But my email templates are located in the Services project.
How can i refference the path to the templates (partial/view) in my Service project from inside the Web project, that works with either LoadControl or RenderPartial which both takes a virtual path as a parameter ?
It seems like no matter what i do the root directory is set to the Web projects directory.
Is it possible ?
Would be nice to be able to make it work independently of the web project somehow.
I don't think this is possible without developing your own view engine. The default view engine will only look in certain locations for the partial view -- which includes the current view folder and the shared views folder. I don't think you can search for views outside the current project since those views aren't registered with the view engine.
You can consider just creating your HTML helpers to render emails and return it as a string.
Doesn't really matter whether it is partial view or a method returning a string with HTML. i actually think that for your case helper methods would be a better choice.
A simple helper method is also more flexible in the ways you can use it.
You could try creating a custom view engine locator or virtual path provider. Here are a few examples that may help you get going:
Views in seperate assemblies in ASP.NET MVC
Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC
How to use virtual path providers to dynamically load and compile content from virtual paths in ASP.NET 2.0
All of the links above are good, this might help as well. you will certainly be able to get it to find and use the views. The problem I had was in working with them, there was no code completion etc in the other projects. It was semi possible to get that as well by fiddling around with the project file but to be honest I ended up going with the Grouping solution above
Plug in architecture for ASP.NET MVC