Hello,
I´m not looking for code directly, but for some ideas how to solve my problem the best.
There is this asp.net mvc application I´m working on. It should be "highly modular" and many parts have to be reused across different projects.
Our current approach is using the Managed Extensibility Framework to import assemblies at runtime. These usually consist of everything necessary to work; models, views and controllers. Routes and navigation/main menu buttons are registered when being imported. This works so far; For example, I can simply copy the "news-column" assembly into any other project, include the MEF things, and "magically" the new project serves a news-feature accessible at /News/List.
However, the problem is, while in most cases the default view delivered within the assembly fits, I sometimes would like the imported controller to show up with a different view, displaying other fields in a custom layout. My current approach is to make the action methods in the modules virtual. If another project needs to render the list with a custom view, I simply override the list method, call the base method to fill the ViewData and then simply call whatever view I want. However, this somehow feels dirty and if anyone knows a better solution, I would really appreciate it.
Another problem I´m facing is that I may want an imported model to work with a different table. We are going with Fluent NHibernate where the target table is defined within the ClassMap - Table("News"). Mappings are imported like this:
foreach(Assembly assembly in assemblies)
configuration.Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.AddFromAssembly(assembly));
I could not figure out how to change the table of an imported Mapping, but I guess there is a simple way?
Thanks for at least reading this :)