Question

I am in the process of evaluating technologies, prototyping and potentially defining application architecture for a suite of web based applications that have been written using, ASP.Net WebForms, UIP, Unity, MVP, and a custom frameworks that wraps Entlib 3.1. Some of the problems we have with the current toolkit are:

1. It is really hard to utilise the latest client-side technologies to build Progressive Enhancement into the presentation layer.

2. User Controls are inherently hard to re-use and the added complexity of producing Server Controls inhibits their use on a wide scale.

3. The master page concept does not provide an organisation-wide reuse. It needs to be customised heavily by the project teams anyway.

4. It is extremely hard to produce accessible, compliant and cross-brower compatible HTML.

5. There is little or no opportunity for having reusable screens (Views) across applications within the portfolio.

One of the key requirements that we have is the ability to produce configurable/compose-able navigation flow. In the current architecture, UIP application block allows for that with relative amount of ease.

We are evaluating the use of ASP.Net MVC4 for our future web applications.

My question is this:

Has anyone implemented UIP-style configurable / compose-able navigation capability with ASP.Net MVC?

I came across the PageFlow Application Block: http://webclientguidance.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Page%20Flow%20Application%20Block that is slated to solve this exact problem.

I downloaded the PageFlow Application Block from the wcsf contrib project, http://wcsfcontrib.codeplex.com/, but the source code does not even compile on the VS2010. Has anyone used the PageFlow application block? Is this application block unsupported, and therefore obsolete?

If you had a requirement to do configurable navigation capability for wizard style web applications, how would you do it?

Sorry for the long-winded question. I wanted to provide as much context as possible.

Answer 1

I have been able to build the PageFlow Guidance package with Visual Studio 2010. The source code is available on the codeplex site: http://wcsfcontrib.codeplex.com

There were a few quirks however. Here are the steps I followed:

1. Upgrade the “PageFlow Application Block (VSTS Tests).sln” solution to VS2010

2. Ensure that you build the solution against the Entlib and Unity framework versions from the latest Web Client Guidance Package binaries: http://webclientguidance.codeplex.com/

3. Once you build this soulution, you could also upgrade and build the visx guidance package – “Pageflow Guidance Package (VSTS Tests).sln”

4. Ensure that you have the GAT2010 and GAX2010 extensions installed on your copy of visual studio

5. Ensure that you reference the Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework* assemblies from the GAX2010

6. There is a strange dependency between the pageflow package and the Web Client Guidance package. This is: Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.Extensions.dll. You will have to get this assembly from the Web Client Guidance package binaries.

Once you are able to build the PageFlow Application Block and the PageFlow Guidance Package, you are ready to go. There are couple of bugs within the PageFlowHttpModule functionality when used in conjunction with Asp.Net MVC. The relies on .aspx http extension to determine when to use the module. This is easily fixed.

This Application block gives you two potential ways for configuring your pageflows within the app:

1. Using Workflow Foundation 3.0
2. Using XML configuraion concept, exactly the same as UIP.

Both of these have pros and cons. We are looking to stay away from the WF3.0, since it adds dependency on the old version of the Windows Workflow and the AppFabric in general. Until someone upgrades this to WF4.0, there’s not much point in using it.

In the mean time, the The PageFlow Application Block, MVC4 and Visual Studio 2010 is working like a charm and is doing everything we want to do with navigation.