CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.netasp.net-mvc
Rob Levine
Rob Levine

Reputation: 41298

How to make one ASP.NET MVC site "derive" from another

My question is similar to "ASP.NET 2 projects to share same files", but with an ASP.NET MVC slant.

Basically, we have two sites, one being based mostly on the other (roughly 90% views, controllers, images, in the second are identical to the first). However, in some cases, the views may be different, or a controller in the second site may be different to the first.

Are there any simple ways of achieving this in ASP.NET MVC?

So far, we've looked at using linked files to have two totally seperate projects where the second project shares the files it needs from the first.

One problem with this approach is that most pages in the second project don't literally exist in the virtual directory, it makes debugging a pain - you have to publish in order to generate the files so you can debug.

Does anyone have any better approaches, or ways this approach can be simplified?

Upvotes: 13

Views: 392

Answers (5)

AdmSteck
AdmSteck

Reputation: 1751

I've been working with areas to create multiple websites that I can host with one hosting account. I would think you could use a similar approach. By implementing the common functionality in the base project, it will be available to each area. You can also override any of the base views or controllers by implementing them in the area. It may require some tweaking of the ViewEngine and Routing but I think it could be done.

Upvotes: 2

s1mm0t
s1mm0t

Reputation: 6095

A project I'm working on currently has a similar requirement and we have started looking at using portable areas. I personally haven't delved very deeply into them at the moment, but it may be worth you taking a look.

Upvotes: 2

kervin
kervin

Reputation: 11858

  1. Put as much as possible into a shared non-UI library project. I do that on every project that I work on this, increased testability, shared code with Windows Services, and a host of other reasons.

    I've found that if you're aggressive with this then quite often over two-thirds of the project would be in the non-UI shared library.

    After doing this, you can take things a step further and create a second library with some shared MVC/UI elements.

  2. Depending on your opinion of it, RenderAction may help a bit here. As you know, RenderAction will allow you to group up those controller/view components and pass in variable arguments at runtime.

Upvotes: 2

Ian Mercer
Ian Mercer

Reputation: 39277

If they are 90% the same and you want to keep them in sync as functionality evolves I would consider making them into a single web application and using the host header to differentiate and to change the images/links/text/functionality/etc. between the two sites.

You can do this in your BaseController: look at the host header and create a Brand object that every page and view has access to, just like it might have aUser object. That Brand object can include the name of the site, the canonical Url for the site, the location of the image directory for that brand, boolean values to turn certain features on or off, ...

Now in a Controller you can just ask if (Brand.SupportsPageX) {...} to decide what to show next. And if you make the brand object part of your base view model or put it in the view collection you can have views that use the brand's name, image directory, ... to customize how they look.

Upvotes: 4

Daniel Dyson
Daniel Dyson

Reputation: 13230

This article might help: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/storing-asp-net-mvc-controllers-views-in-separate-assemblies.aspx

Essentially, it involves creating your own WebFormViewEngine which tells MVC where to look for the Views.

Upvotes: 6

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