I'm currently working on an asp.net-mvc content management system. It would be incredibly useful to be able to deploy nested applications e.g. /shop to have a separate app inside. Or even another instance of the cms.
I've found some information around talking about limiting the inheritance of the web.config but I've no idea how this maps to an MVC application. I'm hoping as its essentially the same stack it will just run. Nothing is ever that easy though.
If anyone has any experience doing this I would be really grateful. The idea of one big application to rule them all is not at all nice.
Si.
To be honest you biggest hurdle is going to be creating the routes and making sure they don't interfere with routes already in the system. After you get that working the rest is easy as pie.
The first thing you will need is an HttpModule that will be inserted in to the web.config under the . This module will be used to register and custom ViewEngines or Routes that you want to register. You do this in the same way that you do in the Global.asax but instead of putting them in the Application_Start you put them in the static constructor of the HttpModule. This is so they are only loaded once like Application_Start.
By do the above you will have created a module that is easily transportable and doesn't require the implimentor to modify their Global.asax code to get your stuff to work.
The second thing you probably want to do is create a custom configuration in the web.config to set stuff like the root path of your application. This will be prepended on to the route when you are setting it up in the HttpModule. Also you can use this to store customization information that is not appropriate for the database.
Last but not necessary is that you may want to create a custom ViewEngine that knowns and understands your folder structure. This is only necessary if you want to store the views in a different path than the default views, in order to minimize conflicts.
Check out the Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC from Phil Haack.
Hope it helps,
Bruno Figueiredo
I've gone down this road before (with /blog), but found it to be doable but complicated and difficult to maintain. Instead I ended up using subdomains:
www.example.com
shop.example.com
blog.example.com
These are much easier to maintain because you can just have them work as separate websites in IIS. And, of course, you can always redirect www.example.com/shop to shop.example.com.
Related
Say I've got an MVC website, www.codesmurf.com for example, set up with default ASP.NET MVC routing, nothing fancy. So my BlogController can be found at www.codesmurf.com/blog, and my FAQ similarly at www.codesmurf.com/faq.
Now if I also have a small survey project, currently in a different solution, how would I achieve to access this survey at www.codesmurf.com/survey?
What changes would I have to make to my routing and/or project structure to achieve this? So the entire survey project would be at the controller level of the main website, judging by the uri.
Do I have to achieve this using Areas? Do I need to create a SurveyController on the main site to redirect internally? Do I need to host this website separately and redirect externally? Any IIS configurations? How do I make sure my old routing isn't messed up?
This seemed like an easy task in my head at first, but I really have no clue what the best way to achieve this would be, and questions keep popping up in my head the more I think about it.
Note that the survey site is also an MVC project with its own controllers etc..
I haven't had much experience with changing the MVC routes, but would like to understand what I'm doing as well, so context/explanation would be greatly appreciated.
I personally would add the survey functionality as a service reference to your current MVC project.
Add Areas/Survey to your current MVC project and then start using the code from the service reference as you build up the Survey area.
When adding areas, all you will need to do is add some more rules to your map routes.
routes.MapRoute("areaRoute", "{area:exists}/{controller=Home}/{action=Index}/{id?}");
I've created three related ASP.NET MVC web-applications that sit in IIS like so:
root
|-Emailing
|-InternalManagement
Where the root site is customer facing.
The three sites have different security requirements and I wanted to be able to modify one application with less worry about breaking the other two.
However both the root and the internal management site need to have links to the emailing site.
I'm using T4MVC.
Now I've separated the T4MVC helpers for each project by modifying the HelpersPrefix, and root and InternalManagement reference emailing so for example I can do something like:
Url.Action(MVCEmailing.CustomerDocuments.Index())
Which almost works - except the actual URL produced will be:
For the root application:
http://mydomain.com/CustomerDocuments/Index
for the internal management application:
http://mydomain.com/internalManagement/CustomerDocuments/Index
What I need in both cases is for the URL produced to look like so:
http://mydomain.com/emailing/CustomerDocuments/Index
What's the best way to go about doing this?
Copying from the T4MVC doc:
One key concept to understand about T4MVC is that it is just a thin
layer over MVC. e.g. while it provides strong typing, in the end it's
just putting values in a dictionary, and using standard MVC to
generate the routes.
One thing I often suggest when people have questions is to first
figure out how they would do things without T4MVC. If you have no idea
how it would work, or think it may not be possible at all, then you
are probably expecting too much of T4MVC! Generally, it will not do
anything that MVC does not support.
In your case here, I'm not convinced that you could do this with plain MVC, because each of the application does not have knowledge of the other applications' routes. And generally, I don't think that MVC routing can ever general links that go outside of the current app.
Im really new to Grails and I try to understand how it works. I did some tutorials and wrote a sample application with a mysql database connection. Ive got three tables and therefor three domain-classes and three controller using def scaffold = true. So the views are generated automatically. Now I can add and remove and ... the data in my tables. Thats working.
But now I dont know how to go on. I mean, creating those tables and filling them is nice and its nice that this is possible so fast, but... Now I really want develope an application! Normally I work with Spring Framework, Spring Security, Spring MVC and so on to generate web applications. There, everything is logical. I have the requests comming in, the mapping to controllers, classes which work on the requests, answers given back, jsps rendered.... logical!
In Grails, I dont even know where to start for a real application! All tutorials I find show the same: Setting up those tables and being able to fill them, nice, nice - but after that?
Where do I save the "main.gsp". Do I need a controller for it? How does the application at start up redirect to "main.gsp".
Where can I define the "real logic" - I want to develope something like a "questions with multiple answers - try to select the correct answers"-application. Well, I must admit, I really dont know where to start. And I don't see the use of the Controllers and the possibility to add Data to my tables in my application. Thats for admins but not for users.
Could anyone give me an hint how to go on? Or maybe someone knows a good tutorial which is not about "setting up domain classes, controllers with scaffold, adding data to your database" - I dont see so much sense in it.
Thanks for your help! :-)
[EDIT] Thanks for the answers! Services, that was exactly what I was looking for. I guess I simply must get more familiar with it. The tutorials were just confusing me, but now I understand better!
If you are familiar with Spring and Spring MVC, the concepts in grails should be no surprise to you. Grails actually uses Spring MVC under the covers.
Grails can auto-generate Domain classes, controllers and views as you have tried in tutorials. This is to give you a starting point for your application. This is often enough for those textbook tutorials. For real applications though, you may not always have 1 domain class to 1 controller to 1 set of views. You might not always be doing CRUD operations on that domain. For this, you need to dig a bit deeper into Grails. You can do everything you previously have done in Spring MVC in Grails!
Here are some links to help you get going.
If you are trying to understand the 'flow' better. How requests get mapped to controllers/views, check out the UrlMappings.groovy in your config directory. Docs on that are located here: URLMappings
If you are trying to understand controllers better, check out this: Controllers. Keep in mind that your controller do not need to work on domain models. That is simply the default convention. They work similar to a Spring MVC controller.
Models are simple in Grails. Typically the controllers just return a map of the items you want to return. In Spring MVC, you often create a Model object, most times in Grails you will return something like [name: bean1, name2: bean2]. This allows you to easily get those two beans in the vies.
Start with 'Grails In Action'. The first chapter would give you details about the CRUD Sample app creation , but on reading further you would understand the grails flow better. Services are to be used for the logic, Controllers are used for delegation. You dont need explicit xml mapping as is done in Struts, Spring because everything here works on Convention.
Here is info on controllers: Controllers
Also you can use the same manual to find information on other stuff. For example about where to put business logic you should read in The Service Layer chapter.
Read Beginning Groovy, Grails and Griffon by Vishal Layka, Christopher M. Judd, Joseph Faisal Nusairat and Jim Shingler. They are building a real web application throughout the book with models, database access, authentication, css, templates and layouts, and many other things.
I have an application that will support multiple sites. The site will be determined based on the url.
For example
http://myapp/site/abc123/...
and
http://myapp/site/xyz123/...
The site code will drive a lot of the functionality for example themes, available modules, etc...
Questions:
1-)I need to validate the site code is valid and if it isn't, it should direct the user to an info page. I was looking at using IRouteConstraint, is this appropriate? Are there other/better options?
2-)Any gotchas with this approach (using url to identify site)? Is there are better approach?
Solution
I ended up creating a Custom ActionFilter and check the sitecode in the OnActionExecuting event. That seems to work well and fit better than the IRouteConstraint.
The system I have implemented uses Urls to identify unique page content within a single site and the routing process is pretty straightforward. That being said, you may want to consider making use of Areas in your MVC application. With Areas you can have multiple sections to your website that all have their own MVC structure which can run semi-independently.
Essentially, you will have one base routing definition that lays out some defaults and then the rest of the "sites" will define their own routes pointing to controllers and views in a separate location. It's pretty easy to set up, you'll just need to make sure you're using version 2.0 of ASP.NET MVC. Here's a decent looking tutorial on ASP.NET MVC Areas and Routes. In the current model which MVC 2.0 supports you'll have a single Web project for each area, but that is not necessarily a requirement. Phil Haacked has some code for ASP.NET MVC Single Project Areas if you're looking for another example of the technique, although you, personally, will probably benefit more from the first article.
So long as you define good routes that have clear and measurable constraints, you shouldn't have too much trouble laying out the website you've described.
I ended up creating a Custom ActionFilter and check the sitecode in the OnActionExecuting event. That seems to work well and fit better than the IRouteConstraint.
I need your advice regarding migration. I want to migrate existing project to ASP.NET MVC and I can figure out the proccess except of url rewriting issue:
for example how can I make following route:
http://www.eireads.com/ireland/mayo/cars-3/1263-used-cars-citroen-c5-for-sale.aspx
Or maybe I could somehow keep supporting legacy routes.
I think that migrating a web forms applicaiton to MVC is going to be very hard unless you have a clear seperation of concerns in your current applicaiton. If you have followed a design pattern like MVP then it might be easier, but if not then much of your business logic is likey going to have to be moved to controller classes and much of it re-written.
I would start by extracting your model, this should be fairly easy, then identifying your controllers and actions and seeing how much code you can re-use. At this point you should be able to discern whether or not you can migrate or if you'll be better off re-writing portions of your applicaiton.
Default URL patterns in ASP.NET MVC are http(s)://(appdomain)/(controller)/(action)/(par/ame/ters)
So your url above should fit into that pattern. You can change the pattern to account for other things (like namespace for example). Your URL pattern might be:
http://www.eireads.com/cars/used/ireland/mayo/citreon
where ireland, mayo and citreon are the in put parameters.
I think you should really re-write your question and try to detail exactly what you are attempting to accomplish here.
If you are asking how to migrate an existing WebForm project into ASP.NET MVC keeping the same URL rewrite, the answer is; not easily. The models are too different.
Yet, you mention "routes" in the end, which make me think you are speaking like those of the System.Web.Routing namespace. So are you dealing with an existing MVC app and want it too look like that URL path? I can't tell. I am confused.