I am quite amused by the MVP Pattern http://webformsmvp.com/
How ever I have certain doubts on the implementation part.
Is it necessary that to use this pattern, I have to implement user controls?
I always thought that user controls are created if we need reuse of controls across pages.
Say if I want to implement and test MVP pattern,I should break my simple page with controls to a lot of user controls so that I can apply the MVP pattern?
What if I have quite a lot of standalone components in my webpage?
Is there any gap in my understanding of MVP?
Help.
It is not necessary to implement user controls to use this pattern, in short. Very briefly, you need a view (could be aspx or wpf or winform or console, etc.), a presenter that'll read from/listen to events from the view, make a call to the model and finally populate view with the right data, that's what MVP pattern is.
edit: this example is simple enough.
You don't have to use user control to use MVP pattern. MVP is GUI pattern that helps you to separate your concern.
For example, You write ASP.NET web page to calculate two numbers, with out MVP or MVC or any other GUI pattern, you would write all this logic in your code behind file which is very hard to test. If you want to test it, then you are bringing lot of extra baggages like ASP.NET framework.
In other hand, you write this app using MVP, you would do this.
View => Dumbest in all three. Doesnt have any or minimun logic. So you dont have to unit test it. It simply "tells" the presenter something happened and does what presenter asks.
Presenter => Controls the flow
Model => Business Logic/persistent logic.
I'm the author of the Web Forms MVP project you mention. This answer is specific to that library (which is just one implementation of the MVP pattern).
No, you do not need to use user controls. If you want, you can make your page inherit from MvpPage and it will then work with a presenter itself.
We recommend that you do use user controls though, even if you aren't using the control multiple times in your site. This lets you keep the view, view model and presenter logic nice and bundled as a logical unit for a particular feature. Pages are then used purely for laying out controls.
Related
(Apologies for the vagueness of this question. It is the result of some muddy thinking on my part.)
I am designing a small website with an MSSQL DB. I have just stumbled across the ObjectDataSource class. I think I understand it, but I don't see how it relates to the traditional MVC design pattern, if at all.
The class, according to Microsoft, is designed to sit between the UI (View) and the database, and as such, I would think of it as a Controller. It does indeed map UI actions to behaviours, but it also contains code for writing to the database, which is not something I would expect a Controller to do (but I may be wrong).
It seems to me that it is both the Controller and the Model, but I get the feeling I am not seeing something here.
That's a lot of words to say I am very confused. I would be very grateful to anyone who can point me at anything that might help me to understand what I am missing here.
The purpose of the ObjectDataSource is to intermediate between the view and some code that retrieves your data, not to the database directly. It is not a controller, but something that would call your code to get the data. A better description would be from an MVP scenario, where in MVP the view can manage itself, and the ObjectDataSource is a control that makes that management easier. However, the ObjectDataSource may make it harder to work with a traditional MVP or MVC design implementation out of the box, depending on the framework setup.
I personally don't like this control; I never use it as I'd rather code it so it's easier to see how the binding takes place, in addition to when the binding takes place. My personal opinion.
ObjectDataSource is not used in asp.net MVC if that's what you mean "traditional MVC design pattern". It's used primarily in WebForms development.
It's usually dropped onto a webform component and configured via the UI, although it doesn't have to be. It provides an abstraction that allows other WebForms controls to interact with an object model in a manner that is similar to the way in which these controls work with Databases. This object model may ultimately come from a database, but it allows you to insert your own database methodology in between.
WebForms does not lend itself to the traditional MVC pattern due to some technical issues which complicate using it in that way. A cleaner pattern for use with WebForms is the MVP (Model View Presenter) pattern.
This is a question I asked myself many times. My company uses WebForms, and always I start developing a new application, my problem is managing controls state. With control state I mean things like: "If this ListBox is empty, disable this button, if this GridView is in edit mode and there is a row selected, disable that TextBox, if this button is pressed, refill the DetailsView, etc." Normally, when I finish coding the WebForms application, I have written a lot of code to control all those controls state in the same Page, and that code is messy and error prone. Are there any tecnics I can apply for improving and order the Page's code (distributing it in other clases, for example)?
I've seen some examples of WebForms code where the pages state is controlled using the MVP (Model-View-Presenter) pattern.
The MVP pattern is a variant of the MVC pattern where you have a Presenter class that controls the state of you page. It allows you to extract the code that controls state into a class that is both testable and reusable.
Moving to the MVP pattern if you have used "traditional" WebForms for a while can be challenging, but it will give you much cleaner code if you do it right.
An old but ok article on WebForms and MVP can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ff955232.aspx
You should also google the concept, there are many articles on the subject out there. :-)
You can make it more cleaner using custom userControls.
It's reusable and the code logic is not in your "master" page
I need to write a web page which I need to interact with Grid entry/edit.
I choose ASP.Net MVC and LINQ TO Entity Framework.
What my problem is I have two option to choose at View Layer.
ASPX
Razor CSHTML
Could someone please give me suggestion which one is more suitable to interact Grid Entry Edit process? And Why?
If there are any references , please let me see them also.
[UPDATED]
JQUERY Grid
Telerik Grid for ASP.NET MVC
Razor Web Grid
After I searching through at Google, I get more than one Grid Controls.
I still wondering which one I need to use.
When I was writing with net 2.0 framework, I use template control from GridView Control in traditional way to put Combo or some other controls to attatch with GridView.It is really useful.
So What i thinking is, at asp net MVC 3 version, should i also use these traditional technique as well.
Could anyone please give me suggestion?
Razor is simply more concise. Both Razor and WebForms will offer the same basic functionality, but Razor results in Views that are much less cluttered and therefore more easily understood.
View engines have nothing to do with this. They both provide the same functionality, which you use is up to you and your preference.
There are many kinds of grids available for MVC, but MVC itself does not come with a grid. You either have to build the grid yourself, or use a third party component, most of which are jQuery based. Again, it's up to you what to use, as it's your preference.
All you can do is choose something and go with it. If it doesn't work for you, choose something else. MVC is a technology that requires you to know much more about how the framework works. If you want point and click and drag and drop, you should go back to Web Forms.
.chtm provides "Mapping of Data(or Business) objects that Your UI needs to Render(the html)" in a isolated way, so you can control the Test Cases for your UI as well as your Business Object Unit testing, which is Hard using ASPX since you have to create HTTPContext and (SSL and all crap) just to TEST your Business Logic..in short .cshmt is more NEATLY TESTABLE than aspx.
How to implement paging in ASP.NET webforms when applying the MVP pattern? I'm wondering where to put the paging logic...in the view or in the presenter? Also a neet way to implement paging in ASP.NET is to use the PagedDataSource control... would it be correct to use that from a presenter or would we better of implementing some custom paging logic. The data is displayed in the view using a Repeater control.
I don't know exactly, what difference is there between mvp and mvc, so I think this post might be useful to you. I personally like the idea to create a hepler outside model or controller(presenter?). Also jquery paging mechanism is pretty straight forward. In presenter just add parameters for requested rows of data and return only those instead of whole table/grid/whatever.
I think both the View and the Presenter need to know about paging. Here's why:
Intelligent paging should only retrieve data needed to fill a page. This is a collaboration between the Presenter and the Model in my mind. In pedantic MVP, the View has no knowledge of the Model, so the Presenter must be the go-between. In MVC, you might get away with excluding the Controller with a strong enough domain model.
The View needs to know about paging so that the user can interact properly with the paging metaphore (Next, Prev, proper rendering, etc)
I'm not terribly familiar with the PagedDataSource. If you're using WebForms, you're probably hosed if you want to stick to a faithful implementation of MVP. Perhaps you could set up the page caching for the PagedDataSource (if there is such a thing) in the Presenter and the GUI glamour in the View. It would mean passing around a reference to a user control, but maybe that's okay.
Kudos to you for trying to make MVP work with WebForms. I'd love to hear how it turns out.
In traditional ASP.NET Web Form applications, UserControls are a great way to encapsulate functionality so that it can be reused. However, UserControls don't fit well into the MVC model. They often make heavy use of ViewState and they blur the seperation of concerns that MVC promotes.
My question is, how do you best bundle a piece of functionality so it can be shared across MVC applications?
As an example, consider a from/to date-selector UserControl that:
allows a user to select two dates, either using a javascript overlay or by typing in day, month and year into seperate fields
can be configured to default to either today and tomorrow's dates or to dates of the developer's choosing
validates the dates that comes back from the user to ensure the from date is before the to date
exposes From and To properties that can be accessed by code-behind
How would I best build something like this in .NET MVC so that I can easily reuse it?
Note that to fully emulate User Control's functionality the MVC component would have to manage the submitted form data and validation - not just the presentation.
In general I would agree that user controls are nice in terms of encapsulating UI stuff, but I don't think too much has really changed in MVC. If I remember right re-using user controls across classic Asp.net projects was a pain and was never really the best way to truly create reusable components. Most UI toolkits that you bought for classic ASP.net didn't give you user controls, they gave you essentially server controls and javascript controls.
In your example, I would probably create or find a jquery (or ur framework of choice) plugin that did what you wanted on the client side. You could also build a C# wrapper around it similar to what Telerik did with some of the jquery UI controls. I do think that the word code-behind and even viewstate will disappear from your vocabulary the more you get into MVC.
If you look at what open source projects are out there for MVC you will get your answer in terms of what you should be doing.
The MVC Contrib app adds a lot of features by creating extension methods and helpers. Their grid control is a typical way to create a reusable component that you could use across projects
Telerik, created some extensions that wrap jquery controls and do asset management.
Finally I think if you look to the future, MVC has areas, which if I interpret it right will give you the ability to break your project apart into multiple smaller projects.
Besides what is already suggested, ASP.NET MVC v2 will have generic templated input controls, see here. You can read how other people do similar techniques, for example, here:
We have
exactly 1 method call for generating a
form element, “Html.InputFor”. As
part of that “InputFor”, it examines
an input specification, that collects
the PropertyInfo, any attributes, the
type, any modifiers called, and
selects an appropriate InputBuilder.
Call InputFor(p => p.Id) and Id is a
GUID? That creates a hidden input
element. Call InputFor(p =>
p.Customer.Address) and Address is a
complex type? That looks for a
partial with the same name of the type
Having considered the helpful answers from others, I will have a go at answering my own question.
It seems to me that the key difficulty with emulating UserControls in MVC is that they crosscut the concerns that MVC aims to seperate. The from/to date selector UserControl in my example incorporates elements of Model, View, Control and interation. UserControls' ability to bundle all this together is exactly the reason that they don't fit well into MVC.
That means that to create a psuedo-UserControl in MVC requires four seperate pieces:
A Model class - in this case an Interval class or similar
A PartialView that knows how to render the Model to HTML
A jQuery script to layer interactivity on top of the PartialView's HTML
A ModelBinder that can deserialise postdata into an instance of the Model class.
The ModelBinder is important because it deals with data coming back from the user. Without it, every Controller that wanted to display a to/from date selector in any of its Views would have to know how to assemble the six postdata fields - and how to cope if they were invalid or some were missing.
Two ways that I can think of. A partial view though this doesn't really transfer well from app to app because you are moving around ascx files. Not a big pain but not my flavour.
I prefer to use WebControls. They are super easy in mvc and all you need to do is reference the library in the project and possibly in your config file and there you go.
I think some of the answers have missed out on the postback functionality of controls. One way you could handle that is to pass any generic information via ViewData when rendering your partial view. That could then post back to its own control, which in turn could redirect to the UrlReferrer.
Its a little messy and use of UrlReferrer poses a security risk. But it is one way around the problem
You can create a jQuery plugin.
As user-controls provided in ASP.NET Webforms, MVC provide a lot of ways to make the controls and code that can be reused in other app.
Using Partials If your partial code have some C# logic and render the html using Razor/aspx code then it's bst to maintain them in razor file.
Write JavaScript Functionality as plugin If you maintain your code and write it as better as it can be used in other app then it would be a huge advantage for you. Next time when you work on other app just open this solution copy it and modify it. Write JavaScript code that can be used as plugin maybe take some more brainstorming.
Write Code As a Separate C# library If some code is too common for every app you make.for example you write a member authentication system or some global function (C#) that are used in every app you made then maintain them in a separate solution so it can be used in other app you made whenever you trying to make a new app in future.