ASP.NET MVC: Where do library classes go?

Question

I do have experience with Ruby on Rails, and am programming a project in ASP.NET currently. So having found ASP.NET MVC was awesome for me, since it seems to be a verbatim copy of Ruby on Rails in many respects. However, there are differences, and I have to re-learn quite some things.

One such thing is the way additional (library) functionality is handled. I want to add an encryption utility functionality, and in Rails, I would just add a class to the /lib directory and know it would be available in my controllers. How do I do that in ASP.NET MVC?

I thought about creating a model class for this, but I'm not sure if that's the right way to go. All I really want is an encrypt(plain) and a decrypt(encrypted) function that return a string, I will use the .NET encryption libraries for the actual encryption and decryption, but want to encapsulate and proxy their functionality with easy-to-use functions available across multiple controllers.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Within your project you could add a folder called lib, or whatever, and put the code in there.

Answer 2

The best thing to do would be to create a second project that is simply a class library. Then reference this class library in your MVC application.

Answer 3

Asp.net MVC still has references so add your libraries to a folder of your choice and reference that library through the add reference option.

I like the following dev tree structure.

/docs
/lib
/src
/tools

the lib folder is for 3rd party libraries, src is the source of my mvc and tools is for tools like nunit etc.

for your own libraries add a new project for them just like you would in normal asp.net. I also like to add a new project for my model, bll, and dal.

Answer 4

This may not be a direct answer to your question but I have the following structure for an opensoure project which I am developing using asp.net mvc..

* Gol.Core.Session (contains session manager both real and fake)
* Gol.Core.Caching (contains caching including velocity, enterprise lib. provider)
* Gol.Core.Logging (contains logging components and providers)
* Gol.Core.Instrumentation (contains instrumentation related items)
* Gol.Core.UI (UI helpers, and other things related to UI)
* Gol.Core.Security (security,authentication related things)
* Gol.Core.Utilities (common utility functions like encryption, helper methods, etc).
* Gol.Core.Metadata (metadata manager).
*
  Gol.Web.Controllers (all controllers goes here).
*
  Gol.Cms.Contracts (contains the service contracts)
* Gol.Cms.Model (contains the service model)
*
  Gol.Cms.Services (contains the service implementation).
*
  Gol.Web (the web project that contains the views)
* Gol.Test (or Gol.Specification)

Have a related question with respect to this at Project structure recommendation for asp.net mvc