Mock MVC Site, an Outline for coders to see functionality and to start coding.

Question

I have to setup an MVC project to house all the HTML documents. This would be like a hierarchical structure using routing. The pages don’t have to function, just act as placeholders. It’s really just for the group to see all the HTML Pages to get an Idea of functionality. Then we would back fill groups of pages with the functionality by creating the controllers, model etc. How would this be best accomplished? Are there mock frameworks that could accomplish this? So it would be a project just having views, with a control ler that allows navigation between pages, simple to show mostly static HTML pages. The idea is simply for the group to see all the functionality, and to put together a structure to start coding. If possible we would like to see the correct URL based on the route table. What would be a quick solution for this while we work on the back end Object/Domain model?

Answer 1

This is a rather crude but simple solution. Just add the Server.Transfer line to your controller to inject the link to the physical file (I'm assuming the HTML documents exist already):

public ActionResult About()
{
    //TODO: remove mock up redirect
    Server.Transfer("~/MockUps/AboutUsMockUp.htm");
    return View();
}

If you already have the HTML I would just go ahead and implement the views whilst you create the controllers? It may seem like a little extra work up front but by the time you work back through the above suggestion to re-implement the proper views at a later stage that could equate to more time spent!?