Question

I’ve actually asked about this already in this post although we’ve gone back to the drawing board and found it’s much more difficult than we initially thought. We develop a large (and very much relied upon) Intranet system which has evolved tremendously over the years.

The problem is that it uses frames to have a menu on the left, a header at the top and the main page thereafter. This is done to make sure the other elements are static whilst you’re able to scroll through the pages. Now we’ve come up with a solution to achieve this using a single page and CSS, but the problem lay in the actual architecture of our web application.

We’re wanting to shift to MVC architecture to make our pages more secure and manageable, however there is a major problem with this. Each section of our Intranet system has cross-links to other pages in other sections. So, for example, say we had a section called ‘Games’ and in that we had a section called ‘People Playing Games’ but this was actually just using a frame to point to a page which is in another folder on our Intranet system called ‘Personnel’ then ‘People.aspx’ (a pure example). How would the MVC architecture deal with something like that?

We have pages displayed in completely different areas of our Intranet that are in actual fact the same page. So having a URL like http://mysite/section/category/page would have to link to http://mysite/anothersection/differentcategory/page.

Hopefully this makes sense to people with experience in MVC architecture as well as pre-dated architectures such as the use of frames like we’re doing.

The questions raised would be:

• Do we have to have duplicate pages?
• Is there a way to cross-reference a page in different sections using MVC?
• For an Intranet system consisting of about 400 different pages, is MVC the way to go?

Cheers

Answer 1

• You shouldn’t have to, just like the idea behind complex types. You can drop in min-views into a full fledged view to separate repetition.
• You can use Html.ActionLink for creating links to pages and you can use Html.RenderPartial or Html.RenderAction to render a whole action into your page.
• For sure. Like I said you can break up repetition into small components and include them when you want.

For example…

I am working on a small storefront application for a friend and I found myself creating a view for Adding and Editing an Product. Problem is — I was using the same layout for the fields. So I created a MVC User Control and dropped in the fields and did something like this.

For Add..

<asp:Content ID='DefaultContent' ContentPlaceHolderID='DefaultContentPlaceHolder' runat='server'> <% Html.BeginForm<CatalogController>(c => c.AddProduct(null), FormMethod.Post); %> <% Html.RenderPartial('ProductFields', ViewData); %> <%= Html.SubmitButton('Submit', 'Add') %> <% Html.EndForm(); %> </asp:Content> 

And for Edit…

<asp:Content ID='DefaultContent' ContentPlaceHolderID='DefaultContentPlaceHolder' runat='server'> <% Html.BeginForm<CatalogController>(c => c.EditProduct((Product)null), FormMethod.Post); %> <% Html.RenderPartial('ProductFields', ViewData); %> <%= Html.Hidden('Product.ID', ViewData.Model.ID) %> <%= Html.SubmitButton('Submit', 'Save') %> <% Html.EndForm(); %> </asp:Content> 

And the ProductFields partial looked like this

<% Product product = ViewData.Model; %> <% IEnumerable<Category> categories = ViewData['Categories'] as IEnumerable<Category>; %> <table>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.Name', 'Name') %></td>         <td><%= Html.TextBox('Product.Name', product.Name) %></td>     </tr>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.Price', 'Price') %></td>         <td><%= Html.TextBox('Product.Price', product.Price) %></td>     </tr>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.Description', 'Description') %></td>         <td><%= Html.TextBox('Product.Description', product.Description) %></td>     </tr>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.IsActive', 'Is active') %></td>         <td><%= Html.CheckBox('Product.IsActive', product.IsActive) %></td>     </tr>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.IsFeatured', 'Is featured') %></td>         <td><%= Html.CheckBox('Product.IsFeatured', product.IsFeatured.HasValue ? product.IsFeatured.Value : false) %></td>     </tr>     <tr>         <td><%= Html.Label('Product.CategoryID', 'Category') %></td>         <td><%= Html.DropDownList('Product.CategoryID', new SelectList(categories, 'ID', 'Name')) %></td>     </tr> </table> 

So as you can see you can easily break up your pages as needed and include them and pass data into them very easily with ASP.NET MVC.