I am in the process of designing a web application which will have multiple installable modules that provide different functionality. There's a lot of common stuff going on here and I have 3 C# class libraries that I know will be easy to use on different projects.
The bit I am stuck on is the actual website itself. Ideally I'd like to make an ASP.NET page library that can be re-used over multiple projects but I understand that this is not possible.
How do you guys structure your website projects so that pages can be re-used across multiple projects? So far the only solution I've come up with is to create a repository in SVN and have it referenced in the svn:externals properties of the main project. This allows me to add pages to that directory that are common to all websites, and I know I will be able to use this to check them out to other projects. However, I feel this is a bit clunky and will cause problems when creating new projects (there'd be a number of steps to creating the new solution, ensuring that the right externals are in place).
Is there a better solution? What is the best way when you want to share common ASPX files across multiple client projects? How do you manage changes against them?
Thanks in advance!
EDIT:
Many thanks to David for his response. I've had more thought on this and thought I'd list some of my more concrete ideas/concerns. Firstly, a bit more about the project(s). Primarily, it's a CMS. However, we also have clients that will want CRM, and there's also clients that want neither and want an entire bespoke system from the ground up.
In my original post above, I spoke about having subdirectories of the main root (e.g, cms), using svn:externals to allow easy re-sharing of web pages across multiple projects. I am beginning to think this is the only way to do this. One thing that bothered me was if the client's url was:
http://www.shotgunanddribble.com/cms/content.aspx
However, I think I can use the Application_BeginRequest to mitigate horrible urls by rewriting them according to the configuration of the client's site. E.g, if a customer was just a CMS I could rewrite their Top-level-domain to /cms/. Same with if they were a CRM. If they were both:
http://www.shotgunanddribble.com/ -> /cms/
http://crm.shotgunanddribble.com/ -> /crm/
Is there any downside to using these kinds of rewrites? I think that, unless anyone else has any magical ideas, svn:externals is my only hope.
The actual code is easy enough to put in other assemblies and inherit from, but the ASPX files are definitely a different story. How about a common library of user controls to contain most of the display content, and each project would have its own pages which mostly just frame the user controls? I've never tried it, so there may be some "gotcha" that I'm just not picturing right now.
Related
I am new to SpecFlow and I am wanting to reuse steps/tests (.feature files essentially) between solutions. I know there is a way to reuse steps between projects in the same solution by adding a reference to the project but I'm not sure exactly how to do essentially the same thing to a different solution. Thanks for any help on this one.
You cant reuse .feature files but you can reuse step definitions and hooks.
You will have to add reference to the project.
Here is the link how to reference a project in Visual studio: Link
I do not think it is possible to use steps from a different solution. You will need to include them in your working solution somewhere to use them. I don't think Visual Studio has the option to let you use inter-solution code unless you have compiled it and reference it within your working solution.
Doing this is a bit of an anti pattern. The reason for having feature files is to talk about WHAT the application does and WHY its important. So feature files should contain things that are unique to your application domain, and there won't be much overlap between projects
When you write features this way even common functionality isn't really worth sharing, because the complexity outweighs the simplicity of doing things again.
For example logging in is ripe for sharing between applications but all you need in a feature is
Given I am registered
When I login
Then I should be logged in
This is so simple that its easier to just write another one for your second application.
Most steps that people have shared other the years are all about HOW things are done e.g. clicking on things, filling in fields etc.. These generally lead to bloated scenarios and again the cost outweighs the benefits.
If you still feel there is alot of shared behaviour between your applications you may have an architectural problem where you need to extract the shared behaviour into its own application, and have your applications delegate responsibility.
I am thinking about Implementing an admin subdomain - for testing purpouses on the localhost.
I've been thinking, and it Would be preferable if the subdomain had its own set of controllers in different folder (f.e. Controllers/SUBDOMAIN_NAME/newHomeController.cs) or that it would be different part of the web working with the same models and database.
Everything I have read so far included quite big code of, for me as a newbie, magical routing, often leaving the link creating, so much needed in views, unanswered.
Other way I have heard of is to develope it as another project, but that doesnt seem to be the way to go, especially if I want it to be at least a part of the project (same models and db).
I can imagine I am not the first doing that and that this might be VERY common intension so I hope there might be a SIMPLE way to do it (including creating links in view)
I would appreciate any insight into a complete solution of this "problem".
I have a scenario that i have never come across and as such require help. I created an Visual Studio Web Application. The solution had two parts.
Project that holds all the UIs and
a Model that contain my c# code.
The objective was to achieve a 3 tier architecture. The model being the middle tier. The project is running and everything is awesome. NOW! This is my situation and I dont have an idea on how to approach it. I have to build another application, which basically is an extension of the first one. So how I went about starting this was to add another WEB Project to my currently solution. This had a lot of problem. When I deploy the project two web pages would load (one from each project). What i want is ONE webpage to load and base on your userId it will send you to the appropriate location. What I also saw was the second web project i added needed it's own users. How it should be is.. one set of users each having specific access to the application (which ever part). I need input on how to go about getting this done.
What I want is to debug 1 solution (with the 2 parts/projects). Base on userId he/she has access to a specific project but there is one user list that governs the entire solution and not two list, one for each project.
Is there a problem just adding pages to a directory in the existing web project? Normally, separate projects would be deployed as separate applications, not as merged into the same application. You can control access using web.config files in the "secured" directories
Another Architectural suggestion would be to create a Main web project that was sort of a wrapper if these applications are extensive enough and functionally dissimilar enough to warrant separate projects. This would be where your routing logic would take place and would provide simple stub directories for your paths (user-type 1 ... user-type n). Then you can create a project for each of your end paths and set some build actions that take the output of the sub projects and copy them to the output directories for the wrapper project, but this gets pretty complex.
I would still recommend keeping this as a single project if it is to be deployed as a single web application.
While it's possible to make this work as two separate systems, it's really a lot more headache than it's worth in most cases.
The question you should ask yourself is, is it really worth it to do this? What are you gaining from it?
This article explains how to do this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307467
Another option is to create sub-sites, which is to add your additional project as a child. This is described here:
http://abhighag.blogspot.com/2012/03/separate-web-application-into-multiple.html
My new assignment at work is to create a second version of our existing web application. Currently, our application supports only full time brokers, but now we our launching a second site specifically for part time brokers.
The new site will be almost identical to our existing site with the following exceptions:
It will have it's own branding.
A couple of the user controls used for displaying information will be different (but none of the pages will be different).
Our existing users should not have access to the new site and vice versa.
It needs to be easy to test both versions of the website from within Visual Studio easily.
We want to reuse as much our existing code as possible.
I have 2 weeks to do this.
I'm hoping that this is a common scenario and someone out there has some advice for how to accomplish this.
I really, really don't recommend branching projects or other routes which involve copying what is essentially identical code with the exception of branding and authorization. It will certainly be easier in the short run but, as you said, will become a nightmare very quickly trying to maintain almost-identical code bases.
Your pages can make the decision on what controls to show based who is logged in or even set globally to indicate this is the part-time broker version of the application. You could have a set of views and light logic to handle part time vs. full time brokers. Since the sites are deployed separately, a config setting would be straightforward. If you have other versions of the same site, you may have to give this some thought to ensure it would scale with your other variations.
I would even use the same database as long as you can separate the data appropriate using claims-based (preferred) or role-based authorization or similar.
All this said, there does not seem to be any great reason why you'd want to deviate from using the same code base.
I would create a branch of your code and then work against that. This is of course assuming that you are using version control. You are aren't you?
My first thought would be to
copy the entire source code to another IIS website
script the database over to another database (fresh start for new website)
make necessary adjustments to usercontrols and branding
roll out the new site (as Beta)
In Visual Studio, you can create a new project inside the same solution so that you have access to both projects at the same time.
If you're using Version Control... create a branch, and start customizing from there.
what this will do for you is give definitive separation between the two sites... no users have access across sites, all future customizations will be on a per-site basis, etc.
While I really like the idea CaptainTom posted another solution would be to break off the display layer of your application from the rest of the logic and create a new project that implements the new user experience while sharing the rest of the code
i.e. a FillTimeBrokers project and a PartTimeBrokers project with both implementing their logic from a common Brokers project.
Over time, the code base I maintain has grown exponentially. We have a variety of different utility classes, webparts, event receivers, console applications, and more.
Typically, each webpart lives in a separate DLL (one solution and one project per web part). Our utility classes have also been largely separated out into their own separate DLLs (this includes any specialized list access classes that get grouped with their beans together in a DLL). This has led to a large amount of solutions which has become more difficult to maintain (upgrading each solution to Visual Studio 2008, or simply just trying to find out the maze of DLL references).
With my discovery of the SharePoint Guidance, I'm re-evaluating our current code structure. For example, it looks like they recommend combining all of your specialized list access classes into a Repository (we've done completely the opposite so far by splitting them into DLLs based on what "solution" the code is for).
Questions: How should I be organizing my code? How do you decide what goes into a solution vs project vs folder or what goes in a namespace? One solution per web part?
I usually organize my code by functionality. Let's say I've got an extranet project and some code for some intranet webparts, I seperate it out into a Extranet and an Intranet project, and seperate the different classes of code (eventreceivers, timerjobs, webparts, etc.) into different namespace.
That way, I can deploy (sub)sets of functionality to different farms if I want to, and when editing code I got everything that depends on one another in the same place :)