Currently I am working on small application in asp.net mvc. It is a some kind of localization tool. Our clients login on our application and they can translate terms that shows up in our applications that they use. It is happens like this:
- login to localization site
- find and translate certain terms for example title for button in “Catalog” application
- start that application(for example, “Catalog” application from 2.) and trough web services they update local database of terms with these that are translated
It is our old solution and that works fine.
But now, I am doing refactoring of a translating tool application in asp.net mvc and I think, why we have separate logic(doubled) in mvc and in web services? Why we can’t use only mvc as a web service…this way I have only one logic(fetching elements and updating) and we don’t need to create wcf web service or something. And most important, I don’t have mesh desktop applications with dependency on dll’s in which I have this logic.
And now the question. What I can get from controller in mvc, except of views and JsonResults…can I get collections of my objects directly?
Or more plain question, how I can use asp.net mvc as a web services. What is your experience?
cheers
Marko
It really depends on your needs. You can most certainly use an ASP.NET MVC application as a data service, but it sounds like you should tease out your shared code into a common library and reference that library in both applications. There are some things that web service projects provide that would be more difficult purely as a controller action. (de/serialization, wsdl, etc…)