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.
Related
I'm newbie in angular so i have two questions on AngularJS routing. Deeply sorry if this has been answered. tried a brief search, didnt find exact match.
I get the idea of SPA, the cost of asp.net server round trip,
however, what's a valid real world scenario that make best use of
both server side routing and client side routing together? or simply
give up the asp.net mvc routing at all?
If partial routing rules
defined on both side, isn't it a bit messy?
well, that depends on what you need I saw some people doing a mix of routes between angular and MVC, you can take a look to he boilerplate and hot towel projects for asp.net and angular combo take them as reference, both are like starter kits.
In my personal opinion (and this is subjective), I prefer to use a RESTFul architecture / SPA let angular do the routing and have web API or service stack as a middleware very much like the mean.js approach for me it's a cleaner and more natural for a SPA application.
take a look to this article that talks about rest API and some best practices.
I don't know if there's a perfect answer since it all depends on the project you're working on and the preferences of the dev team. I personally like keeping some of the MVC concepts (mvc views, routing, etc.) and just using angular for a given page's functionality. I don't make use of the angular routing at all. Obviously it would be a different story if you were trying to create a full SPA.
But I find that in a lot of cases (especially if working on an existing app written in MVC) you can introduce bets and pieces of angular without taking it all the way. If you're trying to get rid of page redirects entirely and want a full SPA experience then you should probably use a service approach instead as already suggested (if you want to stay with the Microsoft stack, Web API is a good option).
I'm sorry if this is a stupid or obvious question, but I've spent the better part of a week researching, and I really can't find any resources that explain what MVC 4 and Razor are, and what they are intended to do in web development. I'm not necessarily asking for a really detailed description, even a link to a website or the name of a book that doesn't explain MVC 4 by referencing other technologies that I have also never used. I've looked through articles, articles and tutorials on everything from MSDN to graduate papers and I just don't get it.
I know what MVC the design pattern is, but one of the main things I can't get a straight answer to is what the difference is between MVC the pattern and MVC 4 the framework. As a web developer, will I ever have to change or make use of the frameworks, or is it something that is supposed to "stay out of your way" (to quote another SO post.) Is it something that gets generated by VS and I will never have to touch?
Again, I'm sorry if this is obvious, maybe I'm trying to make this more complicated than it actually is. All I have been looking for is a straight forward answer with concrete examples that don't contradict or complicate it any further.
Please...I'm at my wits end here. My last question was apparently too vague and got voted down and closed, so I tried to be more specific, but part of my problem is what are the right questions to ask.If there is anything that can say to clarify,please tell me.
I certainly don't want to discourage you any more than you appear to be at the moment, but in my opinion, if you can't make head or tail of the huge amount of material that already exists on MVC, then perhaps you are just not ready for it yet. That's OK - in fact Microsoft recognise that MVC is complicated, which is why they introduced the ASP.NET Web Pages framework (which is what gave birth to Razor syntax).
My advice would be to follow the link and download WebMatrix. Then follow some of the Web Pages tutorials. That way you can get your head around Razor without worrying too much about MVC for the time being.
Incidentally, ASP.NET MVC is a web development framework that enables you to build web applications based on the MVC pattern. You need to understand how MVC works in order to make use of the framework. You need to understand what Models are, what Views are and the role that Controllers play in the whole thing.
The framework itself is not an example of MVC.
Razor is a templating syntax that allows you to intermix C# (or VB) with HTML to output dynamic content in a View in MVC or a page in the Web Pages framework.
I know it may seem confusing, but it seems to me that you are over complicating things.
The simple matter is that MVC is a design pattern. That is, it's an abstract thing.. a philosophy of sorts. It's not a concrete thing. A design pattern simply gives you a description of how the pattern is supposed to work, and while it may give you a sample implementation, in general it leaves that implementation up to you.
ASP.NET MVC (whichever version) is a specific application framework that uses the MVC pattern as its basis. In other words, it's a concrete implementation of the MVC design pattern.
In fact, the ASP.NET MVC implementation isn't even a "true" implementation of the MVC design pattern, as certain compromises are necessary to make it work in a web based model. So it's really more "MVC design pattern inspired".
You're overthinking things. Just accept that ASP.NET MVC is a framework library that implements and MVC design pattern.
As for Razor, it's merely a templating library. That is, it allows you to define a page layout as text, and insert values at specific places (place-holders). It also allows code to be executed during the process of rendering a template, although this is discouraged in MVC except for very simple cases.
Razor is also used in ASP.NET WebPages technology, in those cases it tends to be more like PHP or classic asp in that all code exists in code blocks within the template itself. Both ASP.NET and WebPages use the Razor templating engine (also called a View Engine) but they use them in different ways.
I always used asp.net webforms with the MVP pattern, it works great for what I need, I basically create a project where all my business rules reside, validation etc... and I then implement my views in the webforms project.
Now we're starting to use asp.net MVC and using the MVP patter doesn't make much sense, right? So what could be a good approach to create a scalable and testable project using MVC that won't make me create my data objects and do validation on the controllers. I don' want to have the same code in different places...
If a web user wants to update his/her profile on the site, there would be some validation rules for when a submit button is pushed, like email address cannot be empty, must be valid and must not exist in the database.
These same rules should be applied if I try to update his profile using the internal admin section without having to duplicate the code there...
If you can point me to a good sample project that deals with this would be great!
Thanks in advance!
You should use the MVC pattern with ASP.Net MVC.
The NerdDinner tutorial is a pretty detailed example for MVC, you can also get a book that includes the tutorial (you might want to wait for the version that covers ASP.Net MVC 3). There are plenty of resources on Microsoft's ASP.Net site.
You can always consult Google.
ASP .NET MVC was built with the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern in mind. That would be the pattern you'd want to use.
In addition to the resources magnifico provided, I know others have recommended the some other tutorials. I don't know if these have been updated to the latest version of the framework, but they should still serve as decent beginners.
MVC Storefront series
MVC Music Store
Also the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group recently released Project Silk which gets into more advanced techniques involving a lot of AJAX management of the UI. There's interesting stuff there.
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've got a pretty simple site (around 8 pages) with only one way page containing any significant codebehind, and I'd like to try learning MVC, using it as the test.
Is it best to start a new MVC Web App from scratch and cut-and-paste the HTML in, or will it be easier to retool the existing files.
Basically, what am I in for? What's it gonna take to get my Web Forms app into the MVC model? What approach should I take? Create the default MVC web app and start cutting-and-pasting? Add the appropriate namespaces and learn to setup the MVC structure myself?
Unlike tvanfosson, I think you will actually learn more about MVC by trying to translate your existing application. You'll learn which assemblies to add, you'll work out how to associate the right http handlers, you'll learn what the correct web.config settings are, and you'll know which dependencies to remove from your web application to get it to work.
To be honest, it will feel harder doing it this way and be a little more frustrating, but at the end of the process you will know a hell of a lot more than just starting a new one from scratch. Good luck with it.
You'll want to start from a project template in a new project. Transfer your markup to your new views as needed, although it's more likely that you'll just be using the old site as a design template than actually reusing code. You'll find that MVC is much different than WebForms.
I don't think retooling the existing Web Forms application is the best approach (or even feasible). As you will surely discover, the differences between Web Forms and MVC are quite big. So, starting from scratch (although you can recycle the html) will most likely be the better approach and the best way to learn as much as possible about MVC.