I am trying to create a .Net Library with few Controllers, and i want to reuse them in Multiple web projects.
I'm half way through, But problem i'm getting is , Whenever i add the library to the new web project , i need to copy all corresponding view files separately to the new project. Whenever i update the library, i need to repeat the steps again.
Is there any way , i can embed View files inside dll as resource , and pass it to "View()" function as an embedded resource.
What i want to achieve is , I want to put controller and corresponding views inside single dll file, so that i can easily distribute/manage the library as a single dll file
( Oneway i already found , is creating custom view class with IView Interface and Render the output directly by writing to HTML Output Writer, But i prefer to use the View file.)
Phil Haack just posted a blog post a few days ago that would probably help you; He's using a database to store the views and ruby to process them, but I would think you could take his prototype and make it work for views stored in a separate assembly fairly easily.
Just a quick glance through the code and I think the magic sauce is going to be implementing VirtualPathProviderViewEngine (See the "RubyViewEngine" class for example) and inserting your ViewEngine into ViewEngines.Engines Collection (see Global.asax.cs).
You can probably use a VirtualPathProvider for this.
The WebFormView type eventually calls BuildManager.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath. There is not an overload or other function in BuildManager to take input from a stream instead of from a virtual path. Therefore, if you do not want to implement IView yourself, you will need to actually unpack the files to disk so that they can be compiled by BuildManager. You could still distribute your DLL as a single file, but the aspx files need to be produced in order for BuildManager to compile them. See BuildManager help for details.
Check out the ASP.NET MVC View Engine using VB.NET XML Literals project on CodePlex http://vbmvc.codeplex.com
It is a custom view engine originally conceived of by Dmitry Robsman, who is a PUM for ASP.NET at Microsoft. Each view is a VB.NET class and the Namespace (instead of file path) is used to connect Views to Controllers. It's fairly straight forward to copy the content of your ASPX view files into the XML literals in these VB classes. And as classes, they are compiled into the assembly without any extra effort.
If your controllers are C#, then most likely you'd end up with 2 DLLs, but Scott Hanselman has a blog post on getting C# and VB to live together in the same assembly. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MixingLanguagesInASingleAssemblyInVisualStudioSeamlesslyWithILMergeAndMSBuild.aspx
Take a gander over to codeplex and have a look at the Managed Extensibility Framework
Once your done there...
See what Maarten Balliauw has to say about ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
Related
I've inherited an MVC3 project that has a large number of ASPX views that I would like to convert to Razor. This question => Aspx to Razor syntax converter? is similar to mine, and it helped me find a bunch of options for converting the views themselves, but I'm unclear on the steps I need to take in addition to converting the views.
The first known limitation of Telerik's razor-converter is "The tool only works with views and does not deal with the project structure and master pages". This tool claims to be able to convert master pages as well, but it doesn't look like anybody beyond the developer has ever used it.
I think these are the steps I need to take:
Use a utility to convert the views
Convert the master pages manually (how do I do this?)
Modify the project structure (what needs to be modified?)
Delete the ASPX files
Test the application (any specific gotchas I should look out for?)
Are these the right steps? Can you help me with my questions on steps 2 and 3?
I have only tried this on one solution and the actual conversion did a fairly good job. I downloaded the Telerik converter project, compiled it, and then converted my projects using these command lines:
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.ascx C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.aspx C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
aspx2razor C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject\*.master C:\Development\MyProject\MyWebProject -r
I only needed to go back to add an #include for a namespace here and there, and to add a few parenthesis to force the Razor view engine to recognize my inline code properly. This was also a fairly simple solution, so YMMV. But even if it converted 80-90% of your views successfully, it's that much less manual work which you would have to perform yourself. From here, you could also create a _ViewStart.cshtml file and make a few minor adjustments to take advantage of Razor-specific layout features. (Check out Scott Gu's post on it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/22/asp-net-mvc-3-layouts.aspx)
The big issue I had was trying to reconcile the file changes with source control. Since the classic MVC view engine uses .aspx, .ascx, and .master extensions, I had to manually add the .cshtml files to my MVC web project and source control then remove the old versions. It wasn't difficult, just time-consuming.
In addition, you may need to add all of the necessary web.config entries to support the Razor view engine as well if your project was created using MVC 1 or 2. Projects created with MVC 3 should already have these entries in place, even if it was not originally created as a Razor site.
Is it possible to distribute an EditorTemplate control ASCX along with a type in a library project and have it be used by MVC3 when the type is rendered with the EditorFor() method?
Where I work we have a lot of DateTime, Gender and a few more custom fields which have a specific but concsistent way of (HTML) input and a corresponding backing ViewModel type for them (i.e. DateTimeViewModel with separate month, day, year field etc.) and they are in a shared library project.
However we still have to copy the EditorTemplates for these types to each project which is not very DRY.
So is there a way to bundle such EditorTemplate along with the library project and make sure that it's used when the corresponding ViewModel is used without having to copy all EditorTemplate to every projects?
You need a custom VirtualPathProvider to achieve this but nothing out of the box. Here's a blog post you may take a look at.
Disclaimer: Custom VirtualPathProviders don't work with precompiled web applications. So if you intend to precompile your web application before shipping don't use virtual path providers.
Because of this limitation personally I use custom NuGet packages that allow the developers to pull all the necessary templates to their corresponding locations.
You could create your own VS Template, Export it and distribute it to all of your developers I think.
Write Templates for VS2010
You can register your own VirutalPathProvider implementation:
HostingEnvironment.RegisterVirtualPathProvider(new YourViewProvider());
Then you will be able to get your files from basically anywhere (for example from embedded resource).
Hope this helps.
I think this is not currently possible. ASP.NET MVC editor templates should be defined in a partial view file. There is no way to define them in code only.
is there any particular directory that i should put my code into in an asp.net mvc project
i have some extentions to the HtmlHelper class. Right now i have it sitting in the Content folder. is this correct? is there a better soluiton?
I usually create a separate project (or projects) for my own code, including my data layer, as class libraries. I then reference the libraries in my MVC web site.
you can put code wherever you want, but typically you want things organised. heres how i do it:
2 assemblies
MyProject.Domain
this contains all my domain code; business logic and entities
MyProject.Web
this contains controller code, views and assets like css/images
Your HtmlHelpers belong in the .Web project because they are mvc related (nothing to do with the domain). You probably want a new folder called Helpers or Extentions. Its really up to you, the key point is to decide where something belongs and to namespace it accordingly
I agree with what everyone else said, here's how one of my solutions would look like:
1- MyProject.WebUI
2- MyProject.DomainModel
3- MyProject.Test
4- MyProject.Extensions
This extensions project is new to me (actually since I knew about extension methods). It usually concludes sub-folders describing what the extension methods are used for, for your particular case, the folder name would be HtmlHelpers. I then reference this project (or its output library when using elsewhere). HTH
If you are going to re-use the same HTMLHelper extensions in different ASP.NET MVC projects, I'd suggest putting them in a class library which is completely seperate from your project.
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
Trying to create a MVC User Control in the Release Candidate and I can't see to make one with a codebehind file. The same is true for MVC View pages.
Creating Views in the Beta would produce codebehinds...am I missing something?
Code behind kind of defeats the purpose of the MVC Framework. Functionality should be kept separate from the view, the MVC team felt that code behind pages went against this ideology and therefore removed them.
Your can create a custom helper method to create your control. Also I'm not sure if MVC has view components (Monorail/Castle) but that could be an option as well.
From ScottGu's Blog post:
*Views without Code-Behind Files
Based on feedback we’ve changed view-templates to not have a code-behind file by default. This change helps reinforce the purpose of views in a MVC application (which are intended to be purely about rendering and to not contain any non-rendering related code), and for most people eliminates unused files in the project.
The RC build now adds C# and VB syntax support for inheriting view templates from base classes that use generics. For example, below we are using this with the Edit.aspx view template – whose “inherits” attribute derives from the ViewPage type:
One nice benefit of not using a code-behind file is that you'll now get immediate intellisense within view template files when you add them to the project. With previous builds you had to do a build/compile immediately after creating a view in order to get code intellisense within it. The RC makes the workflow of adding and immediately editing a view compile-free and much more seamless.
Important: If you are upgrading a ASP.NET MVC project that was created with an earlier build make sure to follow the steps in the release notes – the web.config file under the \Views directory needs to be updated with some settings in order for the above generics based syntax to work.*
I answered this question here:
How to add a Code-behind page to a Partial View
Seems this wasn't particularly tricky, and is quite do-able
This answer worked for a Partial 'ViewUserControl' but the same should apply
Ok.
First: Add a Class file with the convention of .cs (i.e. view.ascx.cs)
Second: Add "using System.Web.Mvc;" to the class
Third: Change the Class to Inherit from "ViewUserControl<>"
Fourth: Add the following to the View's header:
CodeBehind="View.ascx.cs" Inherits="Project.Views.Shared.View"
Fifthly: Copy the files out of the solution and drag back in to reassociate the two together
Note: For this to work with a Normal MVC View you just need to inherit the class from "ViewPage"
The whole idea for ASP.Net-mvc was to get rid of the codebehind files...thats why asp web controls didnt matter that most didn't work.But with the changes of getting rid of the code behind comes with a different programming style..The idea is codebehind files are EVIL:
http://stevesmithblog.com/blog/codebehind-files-in-asp-net-mvc-are-evil/
the whole idea is to make sure people remember they are using asp.Net-mvc and not asp.et web pages. take alook at this link ,it explains it a little better:
http://blog.lozanotek.com/archive/2008/10/20/Visual_Studio_Templates_for_MVC_Views_without_Codebehind_Files.aspx
I think this tutorial is what you are asking.. but not really sure what you want..