I’m building a website using MVC3, EF, and Razor and I currently have the front-end of the site mostly working. It’s a “store” of sorts with products, users, etc and in the front end you can browse for products, see ratings by users, and purchase the products.
Now, I am thinking about the back-end and from what I have so far, it seems like hte back-end will be redundant in a lot of ways. I would like to have an entire back-end area to manage all the products, users, sales, etc (preferably /Admin/Controller/Action, but if I want a page in the back-end that lists all of the products, this is going to be identical (at least from the controller standpoint) to the front-end controller that lists all of the products.
My question is, what are some good ways to go about this, am i completely wrong so far, or am I on the right track and just need some tweaking. I have also read about Areas, but have been unable to find any good documentation to use with MVC3. Should i duplicate functionality in the back end or is there a better way? Thanks for the help!
I believe you’re going about this in a good way, but I think you’re dead on when you were thinking about putting your Admin in an Area. I tried googling for something from Scott Gu for areas, but surprisingly couldn’t find anything dedicated to it, but there is this MSDN article:
Organizing an Application using Areas
I know you’re worried about having controllers with similar actions (and maybe similar models) with the admin as well as the frontend, but it’s still probably optimal to separate the logic. Don’t over-think or over-architect it, because at some point, you may have to modify the admin controller, but not the front-end controller. Models are typically the point that can be commonized between controllers.