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Member

jneylon@porism.com - 2/28/2008 11:52:07 AM

MVC and web application project support

Hi,

I am extending a web site based on Kentico. I want to write the new functionality/pages using the asp.net MVC extensions framework. These pages will not interact with Kentico (and if they do need to in future I will cross that bridge when I come to it!).

My question is:
* Can I build and deploy a Kentico web site as a web application project (instead of a web site project) in visual studio 2008.
* Is there any other issues will I face? (I am assuming the information in the Kentico CMS Pre-compilation article is applicable in my case). Any other information/pointers/experience you can tell me about would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Jason

Member

kentico_vitaja - 3/14/2008 3:38:02 PM

RE:MVC and web application project support

Hi Jason

1 - Building Kentico CMS as a "web application project" should be working properly.

2 - Yes, Pre-compilation article is applicable in this case. We have not tested MVC extensions framework with Kentico CMS yet, however there should not be any issues. In other case please contact us: support@kentico.com

Best regards,
Vita Janecek


Member	richard.warren@northcarolinatechnologies.com - 5/4/2008 7:46:40 PM RE:MVC and web application project support Jason, How did the testing with the current pre-release build of the MVC extensions go? I've been using Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect v7.1 for UML modeling and was toying with the idea of capturing the model to facilitate build-out of extensions to Kentico. Thanks, Richard

Member

jneylon@porism.com - 5/6/2008 8:19:39 AM

RE:MVC and web application project support

Using the two together is going OK.

We have had a couple of issues
* Some conflicts with URL rewriting. To get nice URL from MVC we had to configure IIS to send all request via ASP.net for processing. We had a nasty problem with trailing slashes (/) being omitted on URLs to the root folder. We wrote a custom http handler to fix this issue and another quick and dirty solution would be to use the .mvc file extension for MVC pages .
* The menu and breadcrumbs don't reflect where you are as they are not aware of MVC pages.
* We use a parallel mvc master page that includes the kentico header controls (sitemap login etc.)
* converting the site to a web application project took a few hours and will make upgrades to Kentico a bit more time consuming.

(These are general issues when using existing ASP.NET components/sites with MVC - not Kentico issues per se).

Generally we are avoiding tight integration between the MVC parts of our site and the Kentico part.

In summary I'm glad we did this (I much prefer the MVC model) but do expect some time fix obscure issues like those above.

Hope that helps,
Jason

Member

lorenzon@gmail.com - 7/16/2008 11:31:32 AM

RE:MVC and web application project support

I am about to embark on the same kind of task, good to hear it's doable (MVC, Entity Framework and Dynamic Data are essential for our sanity at this point). I am not too familiar with kentico yet though so I would be interested to hear comments on the following: I'd like to use kentico to handle access control of routes and localization of views in the app. I imagine integrating MVC routes or actions into the kentico security tools is going to require a bunch of custom work, but localizing/editing the content of the views at least shouldn't be too hard a task. How would you go about it?

Member

jneylon@porism.com - 7/16/2008 11:50:46 AM

RE:MVC and web application project support

Hi,

>> localizing/editing the content of the views at least shouldn't be too hard a task. How would you go about it?

We kept the CMS/MVC functionality and pages strictly separate so I am only taking a educated guess at how this could work:

You may be able to add the Kentico content editing controls to the view pages. Failing that use the Kentico object model to get the content out of the database and include it in the MVC page.

Where I can see it running into problem is (inline?) editing on a MVC page as that would probably require a postback.

Hope that helps. Good luck!
Jason