Asp – Building pages with multiple views

asp.net-mvc

I'm looking to build an ASP.NET MVC application where many screens will have multiple distinct views. Ideally the user would be able to bring the items they require into their workspace page in a portal style. Even if that is not possible, there would need to be a number of common items joined in various ways for various classes of user: something difficult to achieve with traditional inheritance.

It seems to me that the URL structure allows for only one controller to instantiated and for this to bring up one view at a time (and only one) – not place multiple views on a page. Searching here I have seen reference to MVC Contrib subcontrollers, but I can't see them on the http://www.codeplex.com/MVCContrib site to check them out any further?

Would subcontrollers be the way to go ? If so, where do I find them now. If not, what would you suggest ?

Best Answer

If you want to stick with using asp.net mvc then you can work with partial views which will/should give you the "web part" type functionality which it sounds like you want. You can then limit the which partial views you want to see depending on permissions etc. on the main page views (this could be exposed via a base controller class or something).

I've done a little searching and have come up with a few links which you might find useful ...

Jeffrey Palermo - Talks about templating partial views

Rob Conery - using user controls with asp.net mvc

mikesdotnetting.com - ASP.NET MVC Partial Views and Strongly Typed Custom ViewModels (not read all of this, but it looks pretty usefu)

Hope this helps.

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to handle multiple submit buttons in ASP.NET MVC Framework

Here is a mostly clean attribute-based solution to the multiple submit button issue based heavily on the post and comments from Maarten Balliauw.

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
public class MultipleButtonAttribute : ActionNameSelectorAttribute
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Argument { get; set; }

    public override bool IsValidName(ControllerContext controllerContext, string actionName, MethodInfo methodInfo)
    {
        var isValidName = false;
        var keyValue = string.Format("{0}:{1}", Name, Argument);
        var value = controllerContext.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue(keyValue);

        if (value != null)
        {
            controllerContext.Controller.ControllerContext.RouteData.Values[Name] = Argument;
            isValidName = true;
        }

        return isValidName;
    }
}

razor:

<form action="" method="post">
 <input type="submit" value="Save" name="action:Save" />
 <input type="submit" value="Cancel" name="action:Cancel" />
</form>

and controller:

[HttpPost]
[MultipleButton(Name = "action", Argument = "Save")]
public ActionResult Save(MessageModel mm) { ... }

[HttpPost]
[MultipleButton(Name = "action", Argument = "Cancel")]
public ActionResult Cancel(MessageModel mm) { ... }

Update: Razor pages looks to provide the same functionality out of the box. For new development, it may be preferable.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

C# – How to handle multiple submit buttons in ASP.NET MVC Framework

Related Topic