Category: MVC

If your using MVC then please at least take a look at T4MVC or better still add it to your project from Nuget here T4MVC from Nuget – It’s written by David Ebbo who works for Microsoft and works on Nuget as well as a lot of other cool stuff.

What is T4MVC? – the following is lifted from the documentation:-

“T4MVC is a T4 template for ASP.NET MVC apps that creates strongly typed helpers that eliminate the use of literal strings when referring the controllers, actions and views. It helps make your MVC code much more maintainable, and gives you intellisense where you normally would not have any.”

Some links for more info:-

• David’s Blog posts on T4MVC can be found here:- Posts
• T4MVC Introduction Video here.

An example again lifted from the site would be:-

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.RenderPartial("DinnerForm");
[/sourcecode]

Now becomes

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.RenderPartial(MVC.Dinners.Views.DinnerForm);
[/sourcecode]

and you get Intellisense for free which is nice.

Also this

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.ActionLink("Delete Dinner", "Delete", "Dinners", new { id = Model.DinnerID }, null)
[/sourcecode]

becomes this

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.ActionLink("Delete Dinner", MVC.Dinners.Delete(Model.DinnerID))
[/sourcecode]

The beauty of this needs to be tried to ge the full extent of whats available but its really easy to add in and change your links in a flash.

By the way it even works for images so heres an example using the aspx syntax.

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] <img src="/Content/nerd.jpg" />
[/sourcecode]

becomes

[sourcecode language=”csharp”] <img src="<%= Links.Content.nerd_jpg %>" />
[/sourcecode]

T4MVC is very handy indeed and you should definitely check this out.

Over the last 2-3 weeks I was looking at implementing breadcrumbs on an MVC 3 website for navigation purposes and I highly recommend using the mvcsitemap provider written by Maarten Balliauw which can be found here and you can read more about his Nuget Package for it Nuget Package.

To try out the MvcSiteMap follow these steps:-

1. Start Visual Studio and choose a new MVC 3 application.



2. Once that’s done open up the Nuget Package Manager Console and add the Nuget package called mvcsitemapprovider.



3. Now we have added the Nuget package you will see that a file called Mvc.sitemap has been added to the root of the solution.



4. Now we want to add some content to the MVC.sitemap file, lets add some content now :-
[sourcecode language=”xml”] <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<mvcSiteMap xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&quot;
xmlns="http://mvcsitemap.codeplex.com/schemas/MvcSiteMap-File-3.0&quot;
xsi:schemaLocation="http://mvcsitemap.codeplex.com/schemas/MvcSiteMap-File-3.0 MvcSiteMapSchema.xsd"
enableLocalization="true">
<mvcSiteMapNode title="Home" controller="Home" action="Index">
<mvcSiteMapNode title="About" controller="Home" action="About" />
<mvcSiteMapNode title="ContactUs" controller="ContactUs" action="Index">
<mvcSiteMapNode title="By Phone" controller="ContactUs" action="Phone"/>
<mvcSiteMapNode title="By Email" controller="ContactUs" action="Email"/>
</mvcSiteMapNode>
</mvcSiteMapNode>
</mvcSiteMap>
[/sourcecode]
5. Ok so now we need to add in a ContactUsController and add the extra 2 ActionResults
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] public ActionResult Phone()
{
return View();
}

public ActionResult Email()
{
return View();
}
[/sourcecode]

6. Last but not least in order to show the breadcrumbs on a webpage just add the following code to your view
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.MvcSiteMap().SiteMapPath()
[/sourcecode]

Now we have the most basic of breadcrumbs working off of our Mvc.sitemap xml file, The next blog entry will cover more complex sitemap which uses a dynamic node provider to generate the nodes dynamically when first called – enjoy.

I have been upgrading an MVC 2 web application (which used the web form view) to an MVC 3 (razor syntax) application and have noted a few things I came across and if this can help anyone then thats always nice. I havent went into the dll changes and any web.config changes required to update the app from MVC 2 to MVC 3 – this is more a post about syntax changes I ran into.

The old code looked like this:-
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] <%= Html.Pager((IPagination)Model)%>
[/sourcecode]

with razor you may see the html being displayed rather than the correct code, to fix this we need to use the Html.Raw() helper which takes a string as follows:-
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] @Html.Raw(Html.Pager((IPagination)Model).ToString())
[/sourcecode]

Another issue I ran into was that Razor automatically encodes all HTMl and this means that to get my HtmlHelpers working I had t make a very minor change. Thw webform syntax would have been as follows:-
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] public static string DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, null);
}

public static string DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, string imageUrl)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, imageUrl, null);
}

public static string DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, object date)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, "/Content/Images/calendar.gif", date);
}

public static string DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, string imageUrl, object date)
{
var html = new StringBuilder();
….
….
….
return html.ToString();
}
[/sourcecode]

With Razor syntax this changes to return MvcHtmlString as below:-
[sourcecode language=”csharp”] public static MvcHtmlString DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, null);
}

public static MvcHtmlString DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, string imageUrl)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, imageUrl, null);
}

public static MvcHtmlString DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, object date)
{
return helper.DatePicker(name, "/Content/Images/calendar.gif", date);
}

public static MvcHtmlString DatePicker(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, string imageUrl, object date)
{
var html = new StringBuilder();
….
….
….
return MvcHtmlString.Create(html.ToString());
}
[/sourcecode]

Hopefully this may come in handy for someone who comes across these items that require changing – I’ll post more if I come across them.