Are there any third-party Templating Engines for Asp.net like we have smarty,savant for php ?
Spark: http://sparkviewengine.com/
Your question does not explicitly states what "breed" of ASP.NET you are using, so I guess it is most likely web forms. If this assumption is correct, I would not recommend for you to replace the default view engine. In order to make good use of the build in controls, you really want to keep the abstraction where HTML like elements can be marked runat=server and accessed from the server side code.
If you happen to use ASP.NET MVC, the picture is completely different. Here, there are lots of different view engines available - including NDjango, NHaml, Spark. If you are the type of web developer who care about the templating engines, you are likely to prefer ASP.NET MVC as a whole, and you might want to check it out before starting your next project.
Related
I would like to know what, why or when it is better to choose cshtml and what, why or when it is better to choose aspx technologies? What are these two technologies intended for?
Thank you,
As other people have answered, .cshtml (or .vbhtml if that's your flavor) provides a handler-mapping to load the MVC engine. The .aspx extension simply loads the aspnet_isapi.dll that performs the compile and serves up web forms. The difference in the handler mapping is simply a method of allowing the two to co-exist on the same server allowing both MVC applications and WebForms applications to live under a common root.
This allows http://www.mydomain.com/MyMVCApplication to be valid and served with MVC rules along with http://www.mydomain.com/MyWebFormsApplication to be valid as a standard web form.
Edit:
As for the difference in the technologies, the MVC (Razor) templating framework is intended to return .Net pages to a more RESTful "web-based" platform of templated views separating the code logic between the model (business/data objects), the view (what the user sees) and the controllers (the connection between the two). The WebForms model (aspx) was an attempt by Microsoft to use complex javascript embedding to simulate a more stateful application similar to a WinForms application complete with events and a page lifecycle that would be capable of retaining its own state from page to page.
The choice to use one or the other is always going to be a contentious one because there are arguments for and against both systems. I for one like the simplicity in the MVC architecture (though routing is anything but simple) and the ease of the Razor syntax. I feel the WebForms architecture is just too heavy to be an effective web platform. That being said, there are a lot of instances where the WebForms framework provides a very succinct and usable model with a rich event structure that is well defined. It all boils down to the needs of the application and the preferences of those building it.
Razor is a view engine for ASP.NET MVC, and also a template engine. Razor code and ASP.NET inline code (code mixed with markup) both get compiled first and get turned into a temporary assembly before being executed. Thus, just like C# and VB.NET both compile to IL which makes them interchangable, Razor and Inline code are both interchangable.
Therefore, it's more a matter of style and interest. I'm more comfortable with razor, rather than ASP.NET inline code, that is, I prefer Razor (cshtml) pages to .aspx pages.
Imagine that you want to get a Human class, and render it. In cshtml files you write:
<div>Name is #Model.Name</div>
While in aspx files you write:
<div>Name is <%= Human.Name %></div>
As you can see, # sign of razor makes mixing code and markup much easier.
While the syntax is certainly different between Razor (.cshtml/.vbhtml) and WebForms (.aspx/.ascx), (Razor's being the more concise and modern of the two), nobody has mentioned that while both can be used as View Engines / Templating Engines, traditional ASP.NET Web Forms controls can be used on any .aspx or .ascx files, (even in cohesion with an MVC architecture).
This is relevant in situations where long standing solutions to a problem have been established and packaged into a pluggable component (e.g. a large-file uploading control) and you want to use it in an MVC site. With Razor, you can't do this. However, you can execute all of the same backend-processing that you would use with a traditional ASP.NET architecture with a Web Form view.
Furthermore, ASP.NET web forms views can have Code-Behind files, which allows embedding logic into a separate file that is compiled together with the view. While the software development community is growing to be see tightly coupled architectures and the Smart Client pattern as bad practice, it used to be the main way of doing things and is still very much possible with .aspx/.ascx files. Razor, intentionally, has no such quality.
Cshtml files are the ones used by Razor and as stated as answer for this question, their main advantage is that they can be rendered inside unit tests. The various answers to this other topic will bring a lot of other interesting points.
I have experience in javascript, html(Bronze certified), css(Gold certified), sql and xml(Bronze certified), and now have turned my attention towards server side scripting. I have little experience in php but have no Idea what to choose between MVC and ASP.NET Web Pages. I like all the features that ASP.NET Web Pages(Since I already new a little about server side scripting, so getting started was not that difficult and I know a few basic things.) have like, automatic form authentication among others but I seriously doubt that it can never be by-passed. Still, for safety I use my own algorithms against sql-injection and javascript codes. But, now I am confused what to learn, MVC or ASP.NET Web Pages. All the posts I searched on internet where for new programmers. Since I am not new they are no use to me. So what should I learn MVC OR ASP.NET Web Pages and why?
*English is not my native language, there may be some grammatical mistakes.
You are kind of asking what's the better option, apples or bananas. MVC is a pattern and allows you greater control over what HTML is sent to the browser whereas Web Forms has a great number of pre-made controls that do all the hard work rendering out html to the browser (but often less control of how it is rendered out)
It's also down to preferences, I personally prefer MVC as the unit testing and component nature of it give me great flexibility. Alternatively, using WebForms you can create some things quickly using drag and drop controls.
Hope that gives you a bit of useful info. I'd recommend reading up about both, and seeing which fits into your style of programming and go from there, but there's nothing stopping you learning and using both (just don't use them in the same project, lol)
I have recently been investigating methods of creating web-based forms for an ASP.NET web application that can be edited and managed at runtime. For example an administrator might wish to add a new validation rule or a new set of fields.
The holy grail would provide a means of specifying a form along with (potentially very complex) arbitrary validation rules, and allocation of data sources for each field. The specification would then be used to update the deployed form in the web application which would then validate submissions both on the client side and on the server side.
My investigations led me to Xforms and a number of technologies that support it. One solution appears to be IBM Lotus Forms, but this requires a very large investment in terms of infrastructure, which makes it infeasible, although the forms designer may be useful as a stand-alone tool for creating the forms. I have also discounted browser plug-ins as the form must be publicly visible and cross-browser compliant.
I have noticed that there are numerous javascript libraries that provide client side implementations given an Xforms schema. These would provide a partial solution but server side validation is still a requirement.
Another option seems to involve the use of server side solutions such as the Java application Orbeon. Orbeon provides a tool for specifying the forms (although not as rich as Lotus Forms Designer), but the most interesting point is that it can translate an XForms schema into an XHTML form complete with validation. The fact that it is written in Java is not a big problem if it is possible to integrate with the existing ASP.NET application.
So my question is whether anyone has done this before. It sounds like a problem that should have been solved but is inherently very complex. It seems possible to use an off-the-shelf tool to design the form and export it to an Xforms schema and xhtml form, and it seems possible to take that xforms schema and form and publish it using a client side library. What seems to be difficult is providing a means of validating the form submission on the server side and integrating the process nicely with .NET (although it seems the .NET community doesn't involve themselves with XForms; please correct me if I'm wrong on this count).
I would be more than happy if a product provided something simple like a web service that could validate a submission against a schema. Maybe Orbeon does this but I'd be grateful if somebody in the know could point me in the right direction before I research it further.
Many thanks.
I'm probably missing something but...
The way I've done this sort of thing in the pass is to create a schema for form declaration & an xslt to convert that xml to html. You can then add all sorts of validation, based on the xml schema you've designed. What I am usually missing is the form designer though.
You can use XHTML for the forms, or like Simon suggested, a custom language as an abstraction layer. The application can load the form at runtime, transform/style it and serve it to the user. You can edit the form and make changes without the need to recompile/redeploy.
For validation you can use Schematron, this can also be easily edited at runtime using XML-aware tools.
You can use Javascript to produce XML data in the browser, or you can transform application/x-www-form-urlencoded to XML on the server (that is what I do on this page).
I want to implement rich reporting features in one of our asp.net mvc based web applications. The required features in the reports are
Graphs
Charts
Grouping, sub totals, page breaking, etc
Ability to export to excel, pdf, csv and other formats
Printing Support
We are ready to purchase commercial controls(if free ones are not available). Please suggest us the best of available options.
I do not know what rich reporting packages are out there that are 100% ASP.NET MVC-driven. I've seen a few talk about MVC.
But technically, you don't need an MVC-version of reporting controls. ASP.NET MVC allows you to use standard ASP.NET functions, such as WebForms, postbacks, server controls, etc. This is easy as a drop-in-place solution because ASP.NET MVC's default Convention-over-Configuration programming checks to see if a directory or file exists first, before being routed through the controller logic.
So, if there are no Asp.Net Mvc versions of graphs and charts you like - then fear not, you can fall back to the ones you've used for your previous asp.net forms projects. Even though I recommend sticking it into a dedicated directory (i.e. /reports) to keep a clean website.
I suggest you try and use a regular web form for the reports, with graphic, charts, and any other ontrol you might need. MVC views and web forms can live in the same project, noting wrong with that. At least until you find a way to do it using a MVC view.
In my own opinion, you don't have to do everything MVC in a project, you are "allowed" to do whatever you need to do to make your application work the way you want to.
You can use the asp.net chart control which is free to download and supported with ASP.net MVC
I found this while searching for something similar.
http://www.componentsource.com/products/syncfusion-essential-studio-aspnet-mvc/index-gbp.html
I haven't used it though. There is a trial download.
Due to a security requirement all browsers that will run a web application we need to create must have all client side scripting disabled. So that means no Javascript.
Unfortunately Web Forms make quite some use of Javascript. The login control works without Javascript, but a button does not (it calls the Javascript function __doPostback()).
So to make it work we'd need to program all the forms by hand (the ASP Classic, or PHP method). But I was wondering if there is a framework available for ASP.NET that offers the normal ASP.NET controls (treeview, gridview, etc) with all the functoinality they have, but that doesn't use Javascript and doesn't require the programmer to program massive amounts of logic?
Update:
For clarification, I know ASP.NET MVC is an option that will help a bit, but it won't give me a nice GridView. So I'm wondering if there is a 100% functional, 100% no-javascript replacement for the standard ASP.NET controls.
Thanks.
Update2:
It's been a while and I never found the exact answer I was looking for. Probably because what I want doesn't exist. So I'll go for ASP.NET MVC which is the next best thing.
ASP.Net MVC is probally the closest you'd get. You can use it to build a site without javascript. It is very different from Web forms
Many of the stock controls will be problematic. They just depend too heavily on Javascript. You do have some options, though:
ASP.Net MVC should give you a bit more control over your html
You can build your own replacement WebForms control library that doesn't rely on javascript to provide alternatives for controls that do.