Advice on how to organize controllers asp.net mvc3 - asp.net-mvc

Question

learning mvc and building a full blown ecommerce app.
Administrators should be able to add-edit whatever they like.
Let's take an example Employees.
I have added an Area called "Admin".Within admin I have Employees
In here an administrator should be able to add-edit info about employees.
Now in the user section the user should not be able to add-edit.etc..
At them moment I have 2 controllers?
Areas-Admin-Controllers-EmployeeController
Areas-Aboutus-Controllers-EmployeeController
It does not seem right to me.How do you handle such a code repetition?
I would like to have only one controller.How do you structure your mvc app in this case?
any example I can download?
Looking for a good examples where you can see areas working and running themes dynamically etc..
thanks for any suggestions

Answer 1

You could use a single ~/Controllers/EmployeesController controller to handle the Employee resource in your application. Inside this controller actions that require administrative (or some logged in user) privileges could be decorated with the [Authorize] attribute by specifying the required roles in order to execute this action:
public class EmployeesController: Controller
{
// Anyone can list employees, even anonymous users
public ActionResult Index()
{
IEnumerable<Employee> employees = _repository.GetEmployees();
return View(employees);
}
public ActionResult Show(int employeeId)
{
Employee employee = _repository.GetEmployee(employeeId);
return View(employee);
}
// Only administrators can update employees
[Authorize(Roles = "admin")]
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Update(Employee employee)
{
_repository.Update(employee);
return RedirectToAction("Index");
}
// Only administrators can delete employees
[HttpDelete]
[Authorize(Roles = "admin")]
public ActionResult Destroy(int employeeId)
{
_repository.Delete(employeeId);
return RedirectToAction("Index");
}
... and some other actions following the Simply RESTful pattern:
http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=SimplyRestfulRouting
}

Answer 2

I'm assumuing your doing it this way so that you can use authentication and have the pretty urls:
/Admin/Employee
/Aboutus/Employee
How about only having a single controller in /Controllers/EmployeeController. You can set [Authorize] attribute on any methods that you need authentication for and control the urls with custom routes?
routes.MapRoute( _
"Admin_Employee", _
"Admin/{controller}/{action}/{id}", _
New With {.controller = "Employee", .action = "Index", .id = UrlParameter.Optional} _
)
routes.MapRoute( _
"AboutUs_Employee", _
"Aboutus/{controller}/{action}/{id}", _
New With {.controller = "Employee", .action = "Details", .id = UrlParameter.Optional} _
)