Question

I am trying to make a multi tenated mvc website where views can be overridden for each tenant.

I’m using RazorGenerator in order to be able to load views from a compiled assembly (with some modifications to allow multiple assemblies).

So now I need to have a way to identify Dlls in the bin that contain views. Currently I’m just creating a dummy class (Class1) and looping through AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().ToList() to see what asssemblies include that dummy class

I can imagine a few possiblities.

1. Create an interface IViewPlugin and assign that to my Class1 in each view plugin assembly
2. Name each assembly MyCompany.Presentation.Views.Plugins.[ClientName] and include all plugins that match.

Are there any other better ways to mark assemblies as being a ‘plugin’ assembly when the assemblies themself don’t have any actual classes in them (unless I specifically create one for purposes of identifying plugin assemblies)

Answer 1

You can create a custom attribute:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Assembly, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
public class PluginAssemblyAttribute : Attribute
{
}

And apply it on the assembly:

[assembly: PluginAssembly]

You can then check if the assembly has the attribute:

if (assembly.IsDefined(typeof(PluginAssemblyAttribute), false)
    ...