Question

I recently attended a demo of a large-scale enterprise system, whose web pages may be customised to the point of including fields added by the client. The way I understand it, their architecture is made up of the following layers:

1. Database
2. Web service API
3. XML files that dictate layout
4. The web pages that are generated from the XML files.

When I was asked to investigate building a web portal which could be easily branded, that struck me as a good way of going about it. The question now, is how one would design it.

I understand the database and web service layers, but I am a little confused by the various possibilities for building web sites in .NET.

Considering the requirement for customisability and the architecture from above, here is how I understand the options:

1. Webforms – the option I am most familiar with, but it is essentially enriched HTML with code-behind. I think there will probably be a lot of work to make it work with the idea of an XML layout.
2. WPF – the XAML middle layer is built-in, but as I understand it, WPF can only really be used in browser applications and not websites.
3. Silverlight – more for building applets than websites, right?
4. MVC – This looks interesting, but all the demos I have seen use Entity Framework as well. It seems to me like Entity Framework with all its automatic code generation is much more suitable to applications that are all new. In my case, I have a very large database that already exists.

If none of the above are suitable, I thought of an alternative. One could do a stock standard Webforms site with a web service that returns the branding elements. That isn’t quite the same as what I described at the top, but is sufficient for my needs.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Answer 1

I think you’re off on your criticism of MVC. First, you don’t need to use Entity Framework, and secondly even if you did, you can do it database first to generate your entities.

Your assessments of WPF and Silverlight is pretty spot on imo.

You could do this with webforms, but I think you’ll probably find doing it with MVC architecture will be cleaner. Very simply, if you use clean HTML and put all branding elements into an external CSS file (logos, colors etc), then you are half way there to a custom brand. Even a different layout could potentially be defined by the CSS file (although it might be harder for your end users to customize that look since they would need to know css pretty well)

Building additional fields is potentially more difficult:

Off the cuff, the way I’d be looking at implementing this would be a combination of my predefined fields in a standard database layout (users table with username, password, first name, etc etc) and additional support for the “customizable fields” using the Entity-attribute-value pattern

From there you will need to develop an extensible system to 1. generate a page from xml with the appropriate form elements (select, text input, textarea, etc). 2. Generate a generic model that will read the same XML file and be able to receive data from a posted form and know how to save that to the database (note in this case if it was ALL entity-attribute-value that would probably be easier to manage than a combination of standard relational and EAV).

You’ll probably want to look at .NET Data Contracts as serializable entities to get an understanding of how you might design your XML files to be extensible to allow for things like “select menu has the following 3 options” or text input must match this regex.

Really keep an eye towards extensibility, because you can’t build it all at once.