Question

We are starting off a new project with sitecore as our CMS. I was thinking of using Sitecore as the Content Authoring Tool and use ASP.net MVC as in the Content delivery(CDA) Side along with Sitecore. Would love to hear your ideas and thoughts on this.

Have anybody tried this?

Is sitecore and MVC competing or Complementing technologies?

Any architectural ideas are welcome.

Answer 1

For certain cases, there can be huge benefit to merging the two. MVC isn’t that great of a fit for content-driven sites. However, web applications with structured flow and multiple presentations of data benefit hugely from it. Sitecore has somewhat of a limitation when it comes to multiple presentations of data — you can only define one set of design details on an item. If you don’t have requirements for WYSIWYG editing or easy one-click preview, you can use Sitecore as a data repository, and take advantage of some of the Context values that come from its pipeline (such as language).

A couple modifications are necessary to the Sitecore HTTP pipeline to make this work:

1) If using the aspx extension in IIS6 to get ASP.NET to handle MVC requests (e.g. /Controller.aspx/Action), fix Sitecore’s FilePath parsing (there is a bug in how Sitecore resolves the FilePath that will result in the path getting chopped).

To fix this, place a new processor at the start of the httpRequestBegin pipeline.

public class MvcFixHttpProcessor : Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.HttpRequestProcessor
{
    public override void Process(Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.HttpRequestArgs args)
    {
        //when using a path such as /Controller.aspx/Blahblahblah, Sitecore's parsing of FilePath can break if Blahblahblah is too long
        RouteData routeData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(new HttpContextWrapper(args.Context));
        if (routeData != null)
        {
            args.Url.FilePath = args.Context.Request.Url.LocalPath;
        }
    }
}

(Edit 9/13/2011: I haven’t had to use the above fix in some time.)

2) Tell Sitecore to ignore URLs that are routed to ASP.NET MVC

To accomplish this, place a new processor in the httpRequestBegin pipeline following the ItemResolver.

public class SystemWebRoutingResolver : Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.HttpRequestProcessor
{
    public override void Process(Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.HttpRequestArgs args)
    {
        RouteData routeData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(new HttpContextWrapper(args.Context));
        if (routeData != null)
        {
            args.AbortPipeline();
        }
    }
}

If using languages in your Sitecore URLs, you will need to add some custom logic that combines Sitecore link generation with MVC ActionLink generation, to ensure that language is added to the start of your MVC URL. However with the pipeline modifications above, the addition of language to the URL should have no side effects on MVC routing (because Sitecore rewrites the URL after reading the language).

Once again, this approach is only useful for certain types of applications. In those cases though, Sitecore makes an excellent data layer for your model. Look into creating custom Item wrappers to create strongly-typed domain objects based on Sitecore Items.

(Edit 9/13/2011: Custom Item Generator works great for this. http://blog.velir.com/index.php/2010/10/19/custom-item-generator/)

Best of luck.