Recently, I was working with PHP.
In PHP we have a powerful template engine like Smarty.
Do we have something like Smarty in ASP.NET ?
Quick google search :
Try one of these :)
http://csharp-source.net/open-source/template-engines
Well, you could argue that all ASP.NET webform pages are similar to templates, as they don't need to (and usually don't) have any application logic within the .aspx pages (it all goes in the codebehind). However, you might find that ASP.NET MVC is even more like what you are familiar with. ASP.NET MVC supports a number of view engines, too.
Have you tried Dotliquid?
It's old but still working great with webforms. You can even have User Controls loaded dynamically that use Dotliquid templates to present data from a database or a webapi, giving you the possibility to change the presentation layer by only editing html mixed with Liquid Language (not fully covered).
Check it out at http://dotliquidmarkup.org/try-online
Liquid Documentation at https://shopify.github.io/liquid/
Related
Assuming I'm stuck with asp.net web forms (I'd love to use MVC partial views), are there any good alternatives to asp.net AJAX 4.0 client-side templates?
In other words, is there some way to specify some html, with placeholders for data properties, to which I could then bind a JSON result. Are there any good jQuery plugins to do this?
I ask because based on the results I'm seeing from Google, this library doesn't seem to be widely used—most search results are from 2008-2010. This question seems to confirm that suspicion.
EDIT
I despise answering my own question, but this link (jQuery Templates) seems to me to be the best bet. If anyone else has any input, please post.
Definitely consider jQuery Templates. We use them quite extensively in WebForms with ScriptServices as a data provider. There is a very small learning curve.
Also check out KnockoutJS, which integrates seamlessly.
Adam, coincidentally, I am using JQuery to retrieve some server side data calling Web Services via Ajax and binding the result on the client side. On my particular case, I am only showing data in a tabular manner, so I am using the jquery datatables plugin (which is fantastic, in my opinion; the API is well documented and easy to extend if you need to).
If you need to show data differently, I think you'll need to write quite a good amount of boilerplate javascript code.
EDIT: I just saw your link reagarding Jquery Templates and looks really cool. I didn't know it existed :) Thanks!
I'm struggling with a few in-house developers that are creating some web apps in VS 2008 using C#.
It appears that the native tools and components in VS 2008 are not being nice about creating Web Standard code.
For example, the navigation component creates items in its own table structure.
Is there anyway to make a web project from Visual Studio create nice, clean, browser friendly code?
You can use CSS Friendly Control Adapters to alter the output of the current ASP.NET controls. It's easy to set up and you don't have to change any existing source code.
If you're bound to ASP.NET WinForms, you could create you own set of controls or use 3rd party controls. There is also a XHTML configuration setting you could set to Strict, so that the controls try to render more valid core.
When you really want to write nice, clean, browser friendly code, you could take a look at ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC gives you complete control of the output, but that means you have to do all the things WinForms currently does for you, yourself...
Certainly. If a component doesn't produce markup you like, then you don't use it. It's just that simple.
Having said that, be sure to check out Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 to see if your issues have been addressed. If they haven't, then you get to complain about them in a way that might get them fixed.
VS 2008 web projects don't do anything web-standards-unfriendly. The standard ASP.NET controls (like the menu control you mentioned)? That's another story -- some use a mess of tables and javascript to do their thing.
The good news? You can use what you want of ASP.NET without having to use those controls if you don't want to.
Go MVC !!! you will have complete controle over your UI
My two cents: machine-generated code is almost never as standards-compliant as the code I write by hand, especially when you get into fancy widgets and whatnot. The obvious trade off is that writing code by hand can be tedious and time-consuming.
We've come a long ways since the dark ages of code-junk that frontpage or dreamweaver used to spit out, but even still...
In the end, your code is only ever as good as your programmers.
The Web Projects themselves are simply containers for the code that you create and a mechanism for managing and building the compiled project.
Based on my experience, the controls generated by VS comply to web standards ... that being said, browsers differ on which standards they do or do not enforce and how they enforce them. For the most part, you have a high level of control of the HTML that is output from your page. The table structure generted by the navigation control id valid HTML - you may be wanting to avoid the use of tables in which case, that particular control might not be for you.
For the most part, when you have a complex control you will need to take what you get - the HTML that is generated may not be intuitive to you and your team but that is often the price paid for the time savings gained by using a pre-built control, particularly one that is intended to service the needs of a wide variety of uses. (The same can be said for most code/script libraries you use/buy/find)
Many controls offer templating that provides you with the ability to define a template for how the resultant HTML is generated.
If you want cleaner markup, you have a few options:
a) Check out the CSS Friendly control adapters from codeplex. They help alot with certain controls.
b) Avoid the more complex server controls. There is very little one can't do nearly as effectively with a repeater and some user controls that one can't do with most any databound control for instance.
c) Try ASP.NET MVC. No neato server controls to do UI lifting, but it will let you make very, very clean UIs.
I'm an ASP.NET web part novice. I've built a few simple ones using only a class that derived from WebPart and overriding the CreateChildControls method, but nothing really very substantial. My question is whether it's possible to have a web part that also takes advantage of a separate html/asp.net markup file that will help provide some structure to the web part's output. In the past I just created server controls and added them to the controls collection, but this seems like a silly way to try to create a non-trivial layout. Can I do this? Do I have to use an ascx user control or can I bypass that step? There are a lot of hello world tutorials on web parts out there, but none seem to go past the CreateChildControls override. Thanks!
Yes, there is. Go here to learn about templated web parts, and go here to see all of the info he has on WebParts. I used this technique back in 2004/2005 and it worked very well.
The links in the above answer are no longer working, but here is an alternative one:
http://www.a2zdotnet.com/View.aspx?Id=95
In VS 2010 we also have visual web parts, that I think do pretty much the same trick but it's wrapped in a project item. I've only seen this in the context of SharePoint so not sure how it works for ASP.NET projects. Here is an example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff597539.aspx
I have very basic knowledge of Javascript and now I am looking forward to learn Ext JS and implement in in my ASP.NET application.
If anyone can guide me on how to start and which book I should follow, I'd be thankful.
Nor sure if it is the quickest approach, but all I did (as well as another developer that was working with me) was review the ExtJS documentation and samples gallery (and viewing their source).
One big issue to watch out for when using ExtJS with ASP.NET is that when using BorderLayout you will go crazy trying to figure out why Postbacks no longer work. There is a workaround though.
Another ASP.NET gotcha is that if you use ExtJS to talk with ASP.NET web services (or WCF) you have to do some special things to get it to work (adorn your webmethod with special attributes, or add some things to web.config, etc).
Those were the only two gotchas I can recall, other than just learning and getting the hang of ExtJS itself.
I am working on a system that gets templatse dynamicly, they contain tags like {{SomeUserControl}} {{SomeContent}}
I was wonder how I could use MVC to render those templates and replacing the tags in the best possible way as the templates will be edited via a web front end, and the content / macros will be create from the same web front end.
You might wanna take a look at maybe using another view engine, here are some examples.
NHaml
Spark
NVelocity
Brail
I'm sure there are many more but these are the ones I could think of.