Embedding View files as resource inside Binary

Question

I am trying to create a .Net Library with few Controllers, and i want to reuse them in Multiple web projects.

I'm half way through, But problem i'm getting is , Whenever i add the library to the new web project , i need to copy all corresponding view files separately to the new project. Whenever i update the library, i need to repeat the steps again.

Is there any way , i can embed View files inside dll as resource , and pass it to "View()" function as an embedded resource.

What i want to achieve is , I want to put controller and corresponding views inside single dll file, so that i can easily distribute/manage the library as a single dll file

( Oneway i already found , is creating custom view class with IView Interface and Render the output directly by writing to HTML Output Writer, But i prefer to use the View file.)

Answer 1

The WebFormView type eventually calls BuildManager.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath. There is not an overload or other function in BuildManager to take input from a stream instead of from a virtual path. Therefore, if you do not want to implement IView yourself, you will need to actually unpack the files to disk so that they can be compiled by BuildManager. You could still distribute your DLL as a single file, but the aspx files need to be produced in order for BuildManager to compile them. See BuildManager help for details.

Answer 2

Phil Haack just posted a blog post a few days ago that would probably help you; He's using a database to store the views and ruby to process them, but I would think you could take his prototype and make it work for views stored in a separate assembly fairly easily.

Just a quick glance through the code and I think the magic sauce is going to be implementing VirtualPathProviderViewEngine (See the "RubyViewEngine" class for example) and inserting your ViewEngine into ViewEngines.Engines Collection (see Global.asax.cs).

Answer 3

You can probably use a VirtualPathProvider for this.

Answer 4

Check out the ASP.NET MVC View Engine using VB.NET XML Literals project on CodePlex http://vbmvc.codeplex.com

It is a custom view engine originally conceived of by Dmitry Robsman, who is a PUM for ASP.NET at Microsoft. Each view is a VB.NET class and the Namespace (instead of file path) is used to connect Views to Controllers. It's fairly straight forward to copy the content of your ASPX view files into the XML literals in these VB classes. And as classes, they are compiled into the assembly without any extra effort.

If your controllers are C#, then most likely you'd end up with 2 DLLs, but Scott Hanselman has a blog post on getting C# and VB to live together in the same assembly. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MixingLanguagesInASingleAssemblyInVisualStudioSeamlesslyWithILMergeAndMSBuild.aspx

Answer 5

Take a gander over to codeplex and have a look at the Managed Extensibility Framework

Once your done there...

See what Maarten Balliauw has to say about ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)