asp.net MVC:hierarchical domain model and controllers

Question

My domain model is this: we have a bunch of schools as the root of the "hierarchy". Each school has teachers and courses, and each course has one teacher. I am trying to model this with the logic of the mvc framework and I 'm quite confused. For example, the \school\details\x should give the first page of a school. That should contain a link to a list of its teachers, and a list to each courses.

A list of teachers means that the index action should be parametric to the school the user is looking at: \teacher\id where id is the school. The same with the course list. And then create teacher or course should also be parametric to what school we are looking at:\teacher\create\x where x=school.

How do I carry around the school id? Is there some neat way to do it, or do I need to pass it around all the time, into every view that needs it? It also makes the site URLs very cryptic. I was thinking of a way to make the url structure like {school-alias}\{controller}\{action}\{id}, still I have to find a way to pass around the school. If this is accomplished, then I need to implement some kind of filter that will not allow a user to perform certain actions if the schoolId he is requesting does not match the one in his profile.

I figure that if I 'm carrying the schoolid around the URL, the site is more REST-like, compared to, for example, getting the schoolId from the user's profile.

Answer 1

Write an extension method to overload rendering of links that extracts the school identifier ( acronym or whatever you choose to use ) from the routing data and adds it to the route values already passed in. This way your action can choose to use the identifier if it is present but is not required to add it to the view data and you do not have to remember to include it in any action links ( you just have to remember to use your action link overload ).

I would make the action link overload quite obviously different so anyone following behind you can see you are doing something unusual. This could be as simple as Html.SchoolActionLink( ...).

For example: If your url is http://mydomain.com/abc/teachers/list and your route is defined as {school}/{controller}/{action} then the route value dictionary will have the value "abc" at the key "school". The route values can be accessed via HtmlHelper.ViewContext.RouteData.Values.

Answer 2

In the end I 'm answering my own question.

The real solution to this is :Restfull Routing. It implements the functionality in RoR, which is exactly what I need. Too bad this is not a requirement from more people so that it can go into mvc-trunk.