CODEWITHSUNDEEP
razorasp.net-corevirtual
Jacob Lewinski
Jacob Lewinski

Reputation: 98

Use a single Layout page across multiple asp.net core projects

I work for a company that develops many websites to be used internally but many have parts that are public facing. It is important that all our sites look the same. In moving to dotnet core we found that we are no longer able to use a virtual directory to host the Layout page for our site.

We were storing our Layout page on a file share and referencing it in our projects with a virtual directory. This way if we needed to change the information in the footer, header, or some style/js we could upload a single change to the Layout page and that change would take place on all our sites.

I've tried researching any possible ways and the only thing I can come up with is a custom middleware that downloads the layout page from the file share and updates the current layout page if it is out of date.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 818

Answers (1)

Neville Nazerane
Neville Nazerane

Reputation: 7019

.NET Core gives you the capability of creating Razor libraries. This would be a separate project where you can have shared views and reference it to the rest of your projects. You can find a simple implementation here.

You can choose one of these two options to do this.

  1. Reference this project in each solution. Since your solutions directly reference the razor library, any change that is made in the common library will be reflected in every solution without the need of repacking and publish.

  2. use dotnet pack to create a nuget in a shared location. While this option will require you to repack and publish each time, in some cases it would be a more organized solution. You can have a version setup. This means that when you update the shared razor project you will define a new version number. You can update this on each one of your solutions. This reduces the risk of a project breaking. Let's say you have 5 projects and 2 of them are not compatible with the latest update. In this case, you can update the 3 right away. The remaining 2 can be updated when you can spend time updating these projects to match the new requirements.

Upvotes: 2

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