.net mvc single admin section multiple sites

Question

Hi,

Desired outcome:

4 customer facing sites as separated projects 1 set of admin code used by all four sites

My current setup is 4 Projects:

• Core for models/entities

• Data for repositories

• Controllers for, well, controllers

• Web for views

Now, the Web project contains views for admin and customer facing sides. I'm wanting to split that into an admin project and 4 'customer' projects.

I've google with little success about referencing a web app from a web app. I've read about areas on haacked.com, but that doesn't seem quite right. I don't particularly want to embed views in a dll, since that would be a pain while debugging/coding markup. Obviously I don't want multiple copies of the code.

Can anyone point out or suggest possible ways to do this? I'm a bit stumped.

Answer 1

If the reason behind splitting the project into 4 webprojects is that customers have different views try this:

Have 1 webproject and use a subfolder for views that differ.

• Views/Home/About.aspx (used if no matching subfolder found )
• Views/Home/Customer1/About.aspx
• Views/Home/Customer2/About.aspx

You can have a custom viewengine that decides which view it should render. Each installation of the web has a customer defined in the web.config.

public class MultiTennantWebFormViewEngine : WebFormViewEngine
{
  private static string[] LocalViewFormats = 

   new string[] {
       "~/Views/{1}/" +  ApplicationConfiguration.CustomerName + "/{0}.aspx",
    "~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",
    "~/Views/{1}/" + ApplicationConfiguration.CustomerName  +   "/{0}.ascx",
    "~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",
    "~/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx",
    "~/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx"
};

  public LocalizationWebFormViewEngine()
  {      
    base.ViewLocationFormats = LocalViewFormats;
     base.PartialViewLocationFormats = LocalViewFormats;
     base.MasterLocationFormats = new string[] {

          "~/Views/{1}/" +  ApplicationConfiguration.CustomerName  + "/{0}.master",
          "~/Views/{1}/{0}.master",
           "~/Views/Shared/"  +  ApplicationConfiguration.CustomerName  + "/{0}.master",
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.master"
      };
}

}