ASP.NET MVC: customized design per domain

Question

Hi.

I'm thinking about ASP.NET MVC 2 project which should display the same Domain Model(with different data) in different mark-up or page design(selected by url domain).

I'm not sure which one ot these to use :

1. set of views per unique domain + one default?
2. use areas?
3. any other idea?

How would you do that? Thank you.

EDIT

I have finally came out with my own solution. Features:

• .NET 4 MVC 2
• frameworks,libraries: NCommon, EF4, MVCContrib, AntiXSS
• loading configuration(modules) per domain
• languages, localization, themes

There is a lot of things to do, but i can share my code to improve it. Send me an email to [email protected]

Answer 1

I would suggest going through the this series of post by Rob Ashton specifically

1. http://codeofrob.com/archive/2009/11/01/dynamically-switching-between-master-pages-in-asp.net-mvc.aspx
2. http://codeofrob.com/archive/2010/02/08/multi-tenancy-in-asp.net-mvc-views.aspx

However, I think though that you may need to do some overriding of how view names are resolved. The key point I think as noted in Rob's post is that views should be resolved and located in reverse order i.e. always look for views defined for your current site and traverse back to the root where a complete set of views are present.

set of views per unique domain + one default?

Yes - bearing in mind that you may only need specific views for a domain

use areas?

No - i dont suggest splitting your app up using Areas in this case. I am assuming that you mean an area per domain. You should still split your app into Areas based on functionality and use the same idea resolving the views.

any other idea?

Using Rob's idea is definitely a good option. I would however take into consideration how many domains(sites) you are expecting to have different view for. I am thinking of the case (not very YAGNI) where every area for each site has different view requirements. So i a well thought plan is needed to stored the views. An example of a possible directory structure.

-- Default
   -- Area1  // Site2's views rendered from here
      --Views
      --Shared
   -- Area2  
      --Views
      --Shared
   ...
-- Site 1 // all views from Site 1 are rendered from this folder
   -- Area1  
      --Views
      --Shared
   -- Area2  
      --Views
      --Shared
-- Site 2 // only view for Area2 are rendered from here
   -- Area2  
      --Views
      --Shared