I was looking to create a simple composite UI style application in Microsoft MVC3. What I want is a host MVC application that will compose its UI from other Controllers and Views packaged in other DLLs. The concept comes from autonomous components and SOA where a service owns not only its traditional business services but all the data and almost-all of the UI.
I thought I would be overriding controller builders, adding configuration, etc, etc, but actually this “poor-mans” variant is very easy. Here are the steps I followed;
- Create your Host MVC3 web application (Host.proj), for the sake of this example choose the Internet application so you get the default HomeController
- Create your satellite MVC3 controller by creating a standard class library project, called Satellite.proj
- Add a reference in Satellite to System.Web.Mvc
- Create a controller for your satellite, say MyController. Add an ActionResult such as;
- Create the View folders for your controller in the Satellite project, e.g. Views\My\
- Now for linking them together. I just added a project reference from Host to Satellite in order to grab the DLL. The Views are slightly harder, I used a post build event in the Satellite such as; xcopy “$(ProjectDir)Views” “$(SolutionDir)Host\Views” /E /R /Y
- That’s it. Just add some code to use the controller, such as placing the following in the index view;
public class MyController : Controller
{
public ActionResult MyInformation()
{
return View("MyInformation2");
}
}
@Html.Action("MyInformation","My")
Edit: Note you get errors complaining that ‘there is no build provider registered for the extension’ you need add a dummy web.config to the project, follow these instructions;
Using Razor in a class library
. I then manually added the missing target DLLs and re-ran the profile. No problems, everything worked.
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