Table Of ContentBy
Nick Harrison
Foreword by Daniel Jebaraj
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Copyright © 2015 by Syncfusion, Inc.
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Table of Contents
The Story behind the Succinctly Series of Books ................................................................................... 6
About the Author ......................................................................................................................................... 8
Chapter 1 Conceptual Overview ............................................................................................................... 9
The Design Pattern .................................................................................................................................. 9
A Brief Discussion on Web Forms ......................................................................................................... 10
More Than Just a Pattern ...................................................................................................................... 11
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 12
Chapter 2 MVC Says Hello World ........................................................................................................... 13
Our First Application .............................................................................................................................. 13
Introducing Models ................................................................................................................................. 16
Value Substitution .................................................................................................................................. 19
Code Blocks ........................................................................................................................................... 19
HTML Helpers ........................................................................................................................................ 20
Layouts................................................................................................................................................... 21
Sections ................................................................................................................................................. 22
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 23
Chapter 3 The World Says Hello Back ................................................................................................... 24
Adding a Controller ................................................................................................................................ 24
Adding the View ..................................................................................................................................... 25
Model Binding ........................................................................................................................................ 28
Filters ..................................................................................................................................................... 29
Validations ............................................................................................................................................. 30
Editors .................................................................................................................................................... 33
Editors Based on Type ........................................................................................................................... 36
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Editors Based on DataType ................................................................................................................... 38
Editors Based on UIHint ......................................................................................................................... 39
Editors Based on Complex Types ......................................................................................................... 41
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 42
Chapter 4 Don’t Trust Everything the World Says ............................................................................... 43
Essential Validators ............................................................................................................................... 44
Validating with Regular Expressions ..................................................................................................... 44
Remote Validators ................................................................................................................................. 47
MetadataTypeAttribute ........................................................................................................................... 49
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 51
Chapter 5 MVC Meets jQuery .................................................................................................................. 52
NuGet Package Manager ...................................................................................................................... 52
JavaScript Background .......................................................................................................................... 54
Download Part of the Page after the Page has Loaded ........................................................................ 55
Retrieve Help Text When the User Triggers the Request ..................................................................... 59
Delete an Item from a Grid..................................................................................................................... 63
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 65
Chapter 6 MVC Scaffolding ..................................................................................................................... 66
Controllers .............................................................................................................................................. 66
Views ...................................................................................................................................................... 67
Enter Text Template Transformation Toolkit ......................................................................................... 70
Edit.tt ...................................................................................................................................................... 77
Adding Our Own T4 Code...................................................................................................................... 81
Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 83
Road Map for Further Reading ................................................................................................................ 84
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The Story behind the Succinctly Series
of Books
Daniel Jebaraj, Vice President
Syncfusion, Inc.
St aying on the cutting edge
As many of you may know, Syncfusion is a provider of software components for the
Microsoft platform. This puts us in the exciting but challenging position of always
being on the cutting edge.
Whenever platforms or tools are shipping out of Microsoft, which seems to be about
every other week these days, we have to educate ourselves, quickly.
Information is plentiful but harder to digest
In reality, this translates into a lot of book orders, blog searches, and Twitter scans.
While more information is becoming available on the Internet and more and more books are
being published, even on topics that are relatively new, one aspect that continues to inhibit us is
the inability to find concise technology overview books.
We are usually faced with two options: read several 500+ page books or scour the web for
relevant blog posts and other articles. Just as everyone else who has a job to do and customers
to serve, we find this quite frustrating.
The Succinctly series
This frustration translated into a deep desire to produce a series of concise technical books that
would be targeted at developers working on the Microsoft platform.
We firmly believe, given the background knowledge such developers have, that most topics can
be translated into books that are between 50 and 100 pages.
This is exactly what we resolved to accomplish with the Succinctly series. Isn’t everything
wonderful born out of a deep desire to change things for the better?
The best authors, the best content
Each author was carefully chosen from a pool of talented experts who shared our vision. The
book you now hold in your hands, and the others available in this series, are a result of the
authors’ tireless work. You will find original content that is guaranteed to get you up and running
in about the time it takes to drink a few cups of coffee.
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Free forever
Syncfusion will be working to produce books on several topics. The books will always be free.
Any updates we publish will also be free.
Free? What is the catch?
There is no catch here. Syncfusion has a vested interest in this effort.
As a component vendor, our unique claim has always been that we offer deeper and broader
frameworks than anyone else on the market. Developer education greatly helps us market and
sell against competing vendors who promise to “enable AJAX support with one click,” or “turn
the moon to cheese!”
Let us know what you think
If you have any topics of interest, thoughts, or feedback, please feel free to send them to us at
[email protected].
We sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book and that it helps you better understand the topic
of study. Thank you for reading.
Please follow us on Twitter and “Like” us on Facebook to help us spread the
word about the Succinctly series!
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About the Author
Nick Harrison has more than 20 years of development experience and has worked with .NET
since the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) went golden. He believes that .NET is a
wonderful development environment that gets better with each update.
Nick also stays active in the local development community as a frequent speaker at local user
groups and code camps. He is an author for the technical journal Simple-Talk and an occasional
blogger on the blog community Geeks with Blogs.
In 2007, he met the true love of his life and was fortunate enough to start a family with Tracy
along with Morgan Faye. To this day, they remain a profound source of joy and a strong
counterbalance to the chaos of daily life.
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Chapter 1 Conceptual Overview
MVC is Microsoft’s latest offering for designing and building web applications, and it is also an
architectural design pattern. As a design pattern, MVC and its variant patterns have been
around for some time but the framework is still relatively new, giving it the advantage of having
learned from earlier frameworks. If you are familiar with other web development frameworks,
then you can trace the history of key features and see how common problems are avoided.
However, this book is not intended to be a history lesson. For the present, be aware that MVC
incorporates lessons learned from many systems and is not in itself "a thing".
The Design Pattern
To better understand the framework, we need to understand the design pattern on which it is
based. MVC and its variant patterns (MVP, Passive View, etc.) separate a web app into three
distinct areas: the model, the view, and the controller. The model is the data that the app uses,
the view is the user interface (UI), and the controller houses most of the app’s logic which ties
the three pieces together.
Figure 1: Components in the MVC pattern
To effectively use MVC, adhere to the following best practices:
The difference
The model should be a simple object with read and write between the MVC,
properties to support a single view. MVP, Passive View,
The view should focus on standards-based markup. and other design
patterns is a matter of
Logic in the view should be limited to user interaction and
how much
not include business logic.
responsibility you give
Controllers should not know anything about how the data in
the various
the model is manipulated in the view.
components. These
Controllers should not know anything about how the data is
are subtle differences
persisted beyond the model.
that we can safely
ignore for now.
Following these guiding principles will help ensure that we stay out
of trouble.
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A Brief Discussion on Web Forms
If you are already familiar with developing web apps with Web Forms, MVC will be a paradigm
shift for you. To fully appreciate the power and appeal of the framework, let’s review some of the
limitations of Web Forms and point out some of the advantages of MVC.
Many of these limitations become less relevant with each new release of Web Forms and can
be mitigated further with best practices. But the following remain the common problems
plaguing many Web Forms apps:
View state
Bloated HTML
Page life cycle
Awkward URLs
Testability
Note: You will find it much easier to integrate client-side functionality to a controller than
to a Web Form’s code-behind. Actions in controllers make natural endpoints for AJAX
calls. We can easily build up the URL for the endpoint. We do not have to struggle to
identify and track the IDs of HTML components. View models, along with the model
binder (which we will soon explore), make it easy to translate data back and forth.
MVC builds on the stateless nature of the web. In many Web Forms apps, app state is
maintained in server-side code with view state required to remind the server of everything that
has happened so far. Getting rid of view state eliminates a lot of what is passed back and forth
between the server and browser. This alone makes pages load faster.
While view state accounts for most of the bloat in the markup, we are able reduce it further with
a stronger focus on standards-compliant markup. With Web Forms’ focus on server controls,
developers often had little control over the markup that was ultimately sent to the browser. The
situation has improved with each release of the framework, but developers still relinquish
substantial control of the generated markup. With MVC, developers still may not have complete
control, but the functionality they are now provided is more focused on producing clean,
standards-compliant markup. With Web Forms, the developer has a large volume of work to
perform to get clean markup. With MVC, the developer has to work hard to avoid producing
clean markup—a transition that turns the workflow on its head.
Note: Standards-compliant markup makes it easier to integrate with client-side libraries
such as jQuery, Knockout, and AngularJS.
The page life cycle has been abandoned altogether in MVC. Each request is truly stateless.
State is more easily maintained in the page than on the server. Each page request has an
associated action; the logic executed during the request can be traced from this one method.
This simplifies troubleshooting and maintenance. You do not have to follow through the events
of the page life cycle to track down what logic is being run.
For many, the most important innovation is the improved testability. It is difficult to build
automated unit tests against a Web Form, but it is relatively straightforward to build test cases
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