Given a Controller name, and a Action name - "AdminController", "Index" for example, is it possible for me to get back all the possible Areas.
Does that make any sense to anyone?
Cheer,
ETFairfax.
It's not really supported to do this. In MVC 2, controllers aren't associated with areas. The way the implementation works is that the route is associated with a set of namespaces, and the controller factory looks only in those namespaces for a controller type to service the request. So there's no direct mapping from a controller to an area.
If you explain a little bit more on what you're trying to do, perhaps we can find an alternative method for getting you unstuck.
Related
I have a client who wishes to use a URL naming convention along the lines of:
/{subjectarea}/{subject}/{action}
Which is fine - this works brilliantly, with one controller per subject area, and having the action after the id (subject) is no issue at all.
However, it then gets complicated, as the client then wants to further continue the hierarchy:
/{subjectarea}/{subject}/{action}/{tightlyrelatedsubject}/{tightlyrelatedsubjectvariables}/{tightlyrelatedsubjectaction}
I have a controller for the tightly related subject (its just another subject area) which handles all of the admin side, but the client insists on having the public view hung off of the parent subject rather than its own root.
How can I do this while avoiding breaking the entire principals of MVC, and also avoiding re-implementing a ton of ASP.Net MVC provided functionality in my subject area controller just to be able to handle the related subjects from that same controller?
Is it possible to somehow call the related subjects controller from within the parent subject controller, and return the resulting view (as this would keep the separation of functionality for the subjects to their own controllers)? If that is possible, it would solve a heck of a lot of issues with this.
Here is the solution which solves my given issue - hope it solves someone elses.
As mentioned in my comment to Robert Harvey, all I actually need is another route which doesn't use the first two or three components as the controller, action and id, but instead takes those values from later on - if you hang this off of a static value in the route as well, its much easier to do.
So, here is the url I decided on to simplify the route:
/{subjectarea}/{subject}/related/{tightlyrelatedsubject}/{tightlyrelatedsubjectvariables}/{tightlyrelatedsubjectaction}
The route which satisfies this URL is as follows:
routes.MapRoute(
"RelatedSubjects",
"{parentcontroller}/{parentsubject}/related/{controller}/{id}/{action}",
new { controller = "shoes", action = "view", id = "all" }
);
On the subsequent controller action, I can ask for parameter values for parentcontroller and parentsubject so I can filter out the related item to just be specific to the given parent subject - problem solved!
This route needs to be above the ones which just deal with the first two values, otherwise you run the risk of another route map hijacking the request.
I could do this entirely without the /related/ static portion as the route could easily match on number of values alone, and infact I may indeed do so - however, I consider it better for later administration if there is a static item in there to confirm the use of the route.
I hope this helps someone!
One way you can do it is specify a wildcard route (notice the asterisk):
routes.MapRoute("subjects", "{action}/{*path}",
new { controller = "Subjects", action = "Index" });
This allows the controller to receive the entire path string after the action.
You can then obtain the hierarchy of subjects in the controller method like so:
string[] subjects = path.Split('/');
Once you have that, you can do anything you want, including dispatching different subjects to different handling methods for processing.
I am writing an area for administering several subsites, almost all of the functionality will be the same across each site (add/edit/remove pages etc) and my repository on instantiation takes the SiteIdentity so all the data access methods are agnostic in relation to this. The problem I have at the moment is trying to make my action methods also agnostic.
The URL pattern I want to use is along the lines of:
"ExternalSite/{identity}/{controller}/{action}/{id}"
A naive approach is to have each action take the identity parameter, but this means having to pass this in to my repository on each action as well as include it in the ViewData for a couple of UI elements. I'd much rather have this something that happens once in the controller, such as in its constructor.
What is the best way to do this? Currently the best I can come up with is trying to find and cast identity from the RouteData dictionary but part of me feels like there should be a more elegant solution.
It sounds like you want to use OnActionExecuting or a Custom ModelBinder to do that logic each time you have a specific parameter name (also known as a RouteData dictionary key).
Creating a custom modelbinder in ASP.NET MVC
Creating an OnActionExecuting method in ASP.NET MVC, Doing Serverside tracking in ASP.NET MVC
You have access to your route values in Request.RequestContext.RouteData, so you can make base controller and public property SiteIdentity, in such case you can access it from all actions in all inherited controllers.
I'm looking at developing an application that will include a CMS. I'm a seasoned web forms developer but only really just moving into MVC.
I have a couple of questions that I hope some of you guys can answer:
First, my current web forms CMS allows users to create a page, and then "drop" any number of user controls onto that page they have created. The way I do this is to create an entry in the DB together with the path and then use the LoadControl method.
I can see I can do this with partial views, but partial views have no code behind. If I've potentially got 100 controls that people can drop onto a page, does this mean that the ViewBag in the controller needs to cater for all 100 controls just in case they are used on the view? For example, a web forms user control will contain logic: rptItems.DataSource = blah; rptItems.DataBind()
With MVC, I'm assuming that logic will be in the view controller and the view would access it by the ViewBag? I'm a little confused at how to do this.
Secondly, how would you handle deep routing?
EG:
Store/Products/Category is fine, but what about Store/Products/Category/Delivery/UK ? Would I need to set up a route in global.asax for each route I need? In web forms, I just called the ReWritePath method and handled the routing myself using regular expressions.
Thanks for the time to read this, and hopefully answer some of my queries
For your second question, (ie, "deep routing"), you can handle this within your controller instead of adding real routes. Each part of the url is available via the RouteData.Values collection inside of your controller action. So, your route may look like
~/Store/Products/Category/{*params}
Assuming typical route configuration, this would call the Category(...) action method on ~/areas/store/controllers/storeController, which could then grap delivery and uk from the RouteData.Values collection.
There are a lot of other approaches to this - storing routes in a database and using associated metadata to find the correct controller and method - but I think this is the simplest. Also, it may be obvious, but if you really only need two parameters beyond 'Category' in your example, you could just use
public ActionResult Category(string category, string region)
{
...
}
and a route:
~/store/{controller}/{action}/{category}/{region}/{*params}
Delivery and UK would be mapped to the the category and region parameters, respectively. Anything beyond uk would still be available via the RouteData.Values collection. This assumes that you don't have more specific routes, like
~/store/{controller}/{action}/{category}/{region}/{foo}/{bar}/{long_url}/{etc}
that would be a better match. ({*params} might conflict with the second route; you'll have to investigate to see if it's a problem.)
For your first question:
You can dynamically generate the view source and return it as a string from the controller, eliminating the need to pass a lot of stuff via ViewBag. If a virtual page from your CMS database requires inclusion of partial views, you would add the references to those components when generating the page. (This may or may not address your problem - if not, please provide more information.)
I have 2 controllers which are SearchController and SearchByStaffController respectively. They are very similar and both have an action with action name "Search". When I call View("Search") in their common super class, the confusion comes. Only the "Search" view with SearchController is rendered.
Does the MVC framework get only the first view that matches the name and ignore the rest?
I tried to pass the view path in View() and it worked. Would there be any side effect for doing so? I searched over the web and seems no one has done this before.
Thanks!
Does the MVC framework get only the first view that matches the name and ignore the rest?
Yes. The routing rules are aparsed (top to bottom) and when a rule is matched all end.
I tried to pass the view path in View() and it worked. Would there be any side effect for doing so? I searched over the web and seems no one has done this before.
You can but I don't like that because MVC is based on conventions. So, I see forcing the path of the view a way to broke a convention. Are you sure you can't simply create two routing rules for the two methods? So you can do something like this:
return RedirectToAction("Search", "Controller1");
and
return RedirectToAction("Search", "Controller2");
user932390,
mvc uses convention over configuration. this means that the 'search' view will have to be located in both the:
views/Search
and
views/SearchByStaff
folders respectively. the only way around this is to locate the search view under the views/shared folder, then the viewengine will find it there in both cases and use it (assuming they have the same model).
I am still learning ASP.NET MVC. With webforms, I would create a new folder let's call it admin. In there I might have many pages for create_product, edit_product, etc. So the URL might look like http://somesite.com/admin/create_product.aspx.
But with MVC it is a little different. I am trying to see what would be the best way to do this.
Would doing http://somesite.com/admin/product/create be right? Or should it just be http://somesite.com/product/create? If I do it as the first way, do I put everything in the "admin" controller or should it be separated into a "product" controller?
I know this is probably subjective or personal choice, but I would like to get some advise.
Thanks.
Part of the benefit of ASP.NET MVC (and more generally, the URL Routing Engine common to all of ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1) is that the URLs can be flexibly configured to map to any folder / file structure you prefer. That means it's much easier than it was in the days of WebForms to modify your URLs after you've started building your project.
To your specific questions:
One Admin Controller vs. Product Controller - In general, the guidance is to keep controllers focused so that they are easier to test and maintain. For that reason, I would suggest using a single controller per object type (like Product) with your CRUD actions. Examples in your case:
/admin/product/create
/admin/product/edit/34 or /admin/product/edit/red-shoes (if name is unique)
In either case, the Create, Edit, Deatils actions will all be in the ProductController. You may just have custom routes for the "admin actions" (like Create and Edit) that limit their usage (and add the "admin" text to the URL), and then the Details action would be usable by all visitors to your site.
Securing Admin Views - One important fact to remember with MVC: all requests go directly to controllers, not views. That means the old "secure a directory with web.config" does not apply (usually) to MVC for securing your Admin. Instead, you should now apply security directly to the controllers. This can easily be achieved by using attributes to Controller classes like:
[Authorize] - Just checks that the user is logged-in
[Authorize(Roles = "Admin")] - Limit to specific user roles
[Authorize(Users = "Joe")] - Limit to specific users
You can even create a custom route for "Admin" views in your site and limit access to those views by enforcing your authorization check in the URL routing, like this:
routes.MapRoute(
"Admin",
"Admin/{controller}/{action}",
new { controller = "Product", action = "Index" },
new { authenticated= new AuthenticatedConstraint()}
);
Where AuthenticatedConstraint looks something like:
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Routing;
public class AuthenticatedConstraint : IRouteConstraint
{
public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
{
return httpContext.Request.IsAuthenticated;
}
}
Good details on Stephen Walther's blog:
ASP.NET MVC Tip #30 – Create Custom Route Constraints
For admin stuff, just mark with [Authorize] attribute. To ensure only admins can use it, do something like [Authorize(Roles = "Admin")]. Check out this question
Also, /product/create is most common, I think :)
I3Dx definitely has the right guidance for the Authorize attribute, this is essential for keeping controller secure, you can apply to a controller or individual actions.
As far as the URL depth, I would not worry about the depth, I would be more concerned that the route made logical sense for example:
domain.com/admin/products/edit/1
domain.com/admin/groups/edit/1
domain.com/products/view/1
domain.com/groups/view/1
This way you know what is happening with each route. it is obvious that one is an admin and one is an end user.
The easyest way to check is to get someone to read your URL and ask them what they would expect to see.
Hope this helps.
OH and one last thing, for client side routes we often use "slugs" rather than ids so that it is more readable. So when someone creates a product we slugify the name so it can be used in the route such as:
domain.com/products/view/big-red-bucket
rather than
domain.com/products/view/1