I'm trying to add some functionality to the default MvcHandler. What's happening is: I wanted to have dashed url's instead of Pascal Case url's. In other words if my controller is SomeController I wanted the URL to be /some-controller instead of /SomeController.
My best workaround was: I've created one mapping file URLMappings.xml which maps each controller to each desired URL. Then I've extended the default Route class to generate outgoing url's based on this and the default RouteHandler to understand the url's based on this. Well, this works fine because even if some mapping wasn't created then the framework will use the default behavior.
My point is: with this the routing system was understanding both kinds of Url's and this leads to duplicate content SEO problem. I wanted then to implement the following:
Get the controller value
See if on some mapping the controller name matches the value
If it matches, then there's some preferable URL than the one that was typed, should return 404.
I've searched on the web and the only way I've found to do this was to create a new IHttpHandler. However I don't want one from scratch, since I need all MVC functionality. I just want to put this logic on the ProcessRequest, however my overidden version of the method is not being executed.
Can someone give me some idea on how to deal with this ? Sorry if the question is silly or if it's not well detailed. If there's need for more information, just tell me.
You don't need a custom MvcHandler but a custom Route. There's a already NuGet package for this functionality called LowercaseRoutesMVC. Feel free to download it, explore the source code and adapt if necessary (to put the dash wherever you want to put it).
http://www.silverstripe.org/archive/show/1638
The above post seems like it's what I should do but I just need some help sorting this out in my head.
Firstly, I need to create a relationship between a page (Owner, for example) and a dataobject (Car). An owner can create many cars which are linked to that one owner. However, I have another page (Garage) which can create cars that are linked to every owner. If an owner does not want one of these cars they reject it. I was thinking the manymanydataobjectmanager would be good for that bit.
Each owner should only be able to see the cars that relate directly to them within the CMS, not other peoples cars, so I was using dataobjectmanager and assigning permissions to the page using groups.
The thing that is really making this awkward is that when it's all set up I need to output JSON which will consist of the cars the owners created and the cars they accepted from the garage, not the ones they rejected. I'm thinking I need another table like the linked table but with a status column perhaps?
To clarify, my question is how do I create this mess in a constructive SilverStripe way? Is the approach I was taking correct or is there a better way?
Many thanks in advance and please tell me if I've been unclear.
are you using silverstripe 3?
could you clarify what of the actions happen in the backend and what actions are possible for the user in the frontend?
maybe for your relations it could be better to use ModelAdmin:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/reference/modeladmin
It gives you the opportunity to manage relations without the Sitetree/Pages Overhead. For example creating a Sitetree Element just to have an Owner is not the best way - except if you really need an Owner represented as a real Page. Owner could be also just a Dataobject instead.
Especially if you want to output just JSON in the end you are maybe completely independent of Sitetree/Pages... then you could write a custom controller with a routing rule and which gives you back just the data that you need:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/framework/en/topics/controller
regards,
Florian
Most MVC tutorials I've been reading seem to create 4 View objects for each Model. For example, if my Model is "Foo", there seem to be 4 .cshtml files: Foo/Create, Foo/Delete, Foo/Details, and Foo/Edit. Using the VisualStudio "scaffolding" helper does this as well.
Is this really considered MVC best-practice? It just feels wrong to have 4 classes that are 80-90% identical to each other. When I add a new field to Foo, I need to edit all 4 .cshtml files. This sort of dual-maintenance (quad-maintenance?) just makes my OO skin crawl.
Please tell me: is there an expected/accepted best-practice which handles this differently? Or, if this really IS accepted best-practice, tell me why the quad-maintance shouldn't make me squirm.
I'm a reasonably skilled veteran of ASP.NET / c# / OO Design, but pretty new to MVC; so apologies if this is a noob question. Thanks in advance for your help!
Edit: thanks for all the replies! I marked the most thorough one as the answer, but upvoted all that were helpful.
You'll probably need between two and four different views:
List (for viewing many things)
View (for viewing a single thing. Might not be necessary, if it's OK to use Edit as View, or if List has room to show all properties)
Create
Edit (can be the same as create, if you code cleverly)
Thus, if your model doesn't have too many properties to show them all in a table, and if you're OK with not having a static, non-editable view for just examining, you can get well away with just List and Edit, and scrap the other two.
However, this doesn't solve your problem of double (or triple) maintenance if you update your model. There's other magic for that ;)
In ASP.NET MVC 3, there are extensions on HtmlHelper that let you do Html.DisplayForModel() and Html.EditorForModel(). These use predefined templates to nest themselves into your object and draw up display/edit fields for all public properites. If you pass DisplayForModel an IEnumerable<Foo>, it will create a table with column headers that are the property names of Foo (using the DisplayName attribute information if you supplied it) and where each row represent one Foo instance. If you give EditorForModel a Foo, it will create a <label> and an <input> for each public property on Foo.
All of the templates used by these powerful extension methods can be replaced by you, if you're not happy with the defaults. This can be done either on the level of Foo, in which case you'd be back in your double-maintenance scenario, or on lower levels (such as string or DateTime) to affect all editor/display fields generated with the templates.
For more information on exactly how this works, google "ASP.NET MVC 3 editor templates" and read a couple of tutorials. They'll explain the details much better than I could.
The views that ASP.NET MVC create for you don't necessarily need to be the views that you use in production. I found those just to be handy while developing quick prototypes or to test the database CRUD operations. Feel free to create whatever view(s) you would like to handle the operations.
I would generally just have 1 or 2 views to handle the basic operations and not use the built in views that are generated. For example, 1 view for adding, editing, or details and 1 view to show a list of objects.
It all depends on your application.
If you have a single item, you don't need a List view. If you can't edit it, then you don't need an edit view. Create and Edit can often be the same view, unless there are special things you need to do in one, but not the other.
In other words, use as many views as you need. There's no hard and fast rule here. The scaffolding is just there to help you on your way. Many kinds of apps will work just fine using the scaffolding, and won't require advanced HTML or Javascript.
Why would you want multiple views? Well, let's take the display and edit functions. You could create one view, in which you use if statements to determine the edit mode of the view, however this will complicated the view logic and views should be as simple as possible.
The reason to create seperate views is that its easier to maintain than one gigantic view with tons of conditional logic in it.
You can use exactly the same view when you are performing [HttpGet]. Given that you pass a proper ViewModel to this view, it will populate with appropriate data every time whether you are loading create, update, or delete Action.
The problem becomes apparent when you try to post that data to a specific Action.
Naturally View should have only one form, which will be used for posting data. When you declare this form, you specify which exactly Action to use for Post.
Having 3 different Submit buttons in that form will not make a difference since all of them will post the same form to the same Action.
You could do some javascript tweaking on OnClick event for these buttons to change Action to which data is posted, but this definitively would not be best practice.
Buttom line: having 4 different views for each of the CRUD actions is the best practice for MVC.
I tend to create the following for an object's CRUD ops:
index
_form (partial)
new
update
delete
view
As the same form is shared between new and update, there is very little difference between the two. It really depends on how much you want the variation to be, honestly.
As for delete, this is optional. I like to have a view in case javascript is disabled.
edit:
You mention view models and the guy above posted a long, convoluted (no offense) VM code sample.
Personally, I hate classes written to basically mirror domain objects and are only used to "move" data. I hate VMs. I hate DTOs. I hate everything that makes me have to write more code than is necessary.
I guess I've drank the coolaid of other frameworks (rails, sinatra, node.js) to the point where I can't stomach the idea of tossing DRY to the wind.
I personally say skip um.
Edit2 I forgot list..
when i create an article useing the story type,could i add some variables into the body's textarea.then can invoke the variable and output it. thank you.
the drupal version is 6.
Inserting textual placeholders to be replaced by actual values on render is the purpose of the filters system in Drupal. Token filter provides, well, token replacement and is an handy tools if your need replacement for tokenized values. But there are plenty of filters for Drupal 6.x and you can even define your own in a custom module. The Custom filter can help for this. You can also use token filter and define your own token in your custom module.
A simple solution is to use the PHP filter but this is a insecure way of doing it. Also, putting PHP code in node (or any content) is a maintenance nightmare and a bad habits. You would be better doing it properly from the start.
Contrib modules would be the way to go, unless you feel comfortable with PHP in which case you can just use the PHP filter. Depending on what variables you need you can try one of:
http://drupal.org/project/InsertNode and http://drupal.org/project/token_filter
There are a couple of others (I like insert view) but they're currently not marked for production use.
I'm in a situation where I think I need to create my own custom search module. What I'm trying to do is make a page with a list of all my nodes in the node type - let's call it 'Beer'. So I want to be able to filter through the beers in a fashion similar to the one you find on the Apple Trailers page ( http://trailers.apple.com/ ).
I tried using Views 2 but ran it to a few problems:
I can't make the filter links like in the top of the trailers page (exclusive, just HD etc.)
The search function will only search one field (Exposed field "Beer title" but I also want it to search for manufacturer and other things.
I'm aware of a couple of solutions:
I could fix the last problem by using the Computed Field Module where I could combine the fields I want to search through. I just don't see this as a very elegant solution.
I could make my own module and create my own database queries where I apply the relevant filters (I just don't know how).
I could somehow use my already installed Solr module.
So the first solution - the easiest I guess but also kind of bad with duplicate content in my database.
The second solution - the best (maybe) - problem: I'm too dumb.
The third solution - Solr seems pretty cool but would I be able to present my beer nodes with just the title and a picture?
So I guess my question is. Which one of the three would you use? Or what other solutions could I potentially use (I'm confident there are things I haven't thought of :))?
Sounds like this could be a good use for Taxonomy not different node types. Also, Have you considered http://drupal.org/project/quicktabs ?
You could set up each "filter" as a tab that passes an argument down to a view. Then don't expose any views filters to the user.