I am building a site in ASP.NET 4 and MVC2 that will have premium features, such as SMS notifications that will only be available to paid subscribers. I also have additional modules for things like Inventory, and Transactions etc
I am already leveraging the standard MembershipProvider, and am leaning towards using Roles tp provide this functionality.
ie: have an "SMSModule" role that the user gets if they pay for the add-on SMS service
This makes the controllers simple with a little attribute decoration, but the problem I see with this is that there will be a bunch of conditional code scattered through my views etc
Is there a better method of providing a "module" style approach in .NET 4 and MVC2???
You can add your conditional logic to view models, use the controllers to set the viewmodels appropriately and it should be fine... Sometimes you have to have the if statements inside the views even if not so ellegent. Unless of course you are using a view engine like spark then your if statements are placed in another unobtrusive location, but they still exist! You can always create HtmlHelpers and set the code to the serverside and based on the logic display appropriately...
FWIW I ended up using a combination of Descriptors in Spark View Engine, along with a custom Feature provider and associated ActionFilter
Related
How can I manipulate other modules without editing them ? very the same thing that wordpress modules do .
They add functionality to core system without changing the core code and they work together like a charm.
I always wanted to know how to implement this in my own modular application
A long time ago I wrote the blog post "Use 3rd party modules in Zend Framework 2" specifically about extending Zend Framework 2 modules. The answer from Bez is technically correct, it could be a bit more specific about the framework.
Read the full post at https://juriansluiman.nl/article/117/use-3rd-party-modules-in-zend-framework-2, but it gives you a clue about:
Changing a route from a module (say, you want to have the url /account/login instead of /user/login)
Overriding a view script, so you can completely modify the page's rendering
Changing a form object, so you could add new form fields or mark some required field as not required anymore.
This is a long topic, but here is a short gist.
Extensibility in Zend Framework 2 heavily relies on the premise that components can be interchanged, added, and/or substituted.
Read up on SOLID principles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design)
Modules typically consists of objects working together as a well-oiled machinery, designed to accomplish one thing or a bunch of related things, whatever that may be. These objects are called services, and managed by the service locator/service manager.
A big part of making your module truly extensible is to expect your developers to extend a class or implement a certain interface, which the developer register as services. You should provide a mode of definition wherein the developers can specify which things he wants to substitute, and/or add their own services to -- and this is where the application configuration comes in.
Given the application configuration, you should construct your machinery a.k.a. module services according to options the developer has specified i.e., use the developer defined Foo\Bar\UserService service as the YourModule\UserServiceInterface within your module, etc. (This is usually delegated to service factories, which has the opportunity to read the application configuration, and constructs the appropriate object given a particular set of configuration values.)
EDIT:
To add, a lot can be accomplished by leveraging Zend's Zend\EventManager component. This allows you to give developers the freedom to hook and listen to certain operations of your module and act accordingly (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern)
I have read a lot of gwt-mvp questions that are asked here, but since i'm totally new to this design pattern I would like to ask some questions:
[1] The Activity-Place pattern is a different pattern than mvp?
[2] In the MVP pattern presenters contain the logic. Now the logic of the widgets/controls is defined in the Activities?
[3] The CustomPlace classes are fixed (as the Eclipse plugin constructs them) or can i put data/methods and what kind?
[4] What is the use of the Presenter interface inside a CustomView? What data/methods would make sense to add into it?
[5] I want to build an application that will use many data structures that will be saved into a database. I have read some other posts here and I will make the Model part of MVP live inside each Activity. So i think to create each time the data structures of each activity at start and load its values (if necessary from db) and will update the database after the user goes to another view. What do you think about this approach?
Let's start by debunking one myth: Activities/Places have nothing to do with MVP. Places is about navigation, Activities are about "componentizing" the UI wrt Places. On the other hand, MVP is a design pattern, it's about how to organize your code.
Many people are using their activities as their MVP-presenters, but it's not enforced. The GWT team is trying a new approach where the activity is distinct from the presenter (work underway in the mobilewebapp sample if you want to follow what's going on there). You could also have your activity being your view and making use of an "internal" presenter (similar to how Cell widgets work)
A Place is more or less a URL. You can put whatever you want in it. I'd suggest making places immutable though: build a Place, goTo it, make use of its properties to build your UI.
That's about MVP then. This is only needed to decouple your view and presenter, mostly to make mocking in unit tests easier (this is particularly of the view interface though, not much for the presenter one, unless writing a test harness for you views). In some cases, you might also want to use the same view with distinct presenters; they'll all implement the same interface so the view can talk back to them.
How about the closing of the window/tab? I'd rather use a periodic auto-save, or an explicit save button; and implement mayStop so it prompts the user when there are unsaved changes (similar to how most desktop office apps work —e.g. MS Word or LibreOffice—, and GMail if you try to navigate away before your mail draft is auto-saved)
The Activity-Place is an implementation of the pattern. Google introduced gwt-mvp pattern at Google IO, but only provided it's implementation as part of GWT about a year later.
Yes Activities contain business logic. No, widgets/controls usually do not contain any logic, they just fire events based on user action. The logic that acts upon those events is written by user and resides elsewhere.
I don't use Eclipse, so wouldn't know about Places generated by it. Normally custom Places can contain custom fields and methods. For example they can contain custom place token arguments, i.e. if place token is "#place:id1", than your custom Place could contain field holding this argument.
When View needs to call/access Activity, it does so via Presenter, which Activity implements. For example when user enters all data in a for and presses submit, then you could have a method in Presenter named submit(formData).
Preparing/loading data in activity.start(..) is a normal way of doing things. If particular activity is used a lot, then you might consider caching the data if appropriate.
I have a concern where I am writing a custom membership provider, but I'm not sure where to put it. I don't really have any code to show you, but basically the provider needs access to System.Web.Security in order to inherit the class, but it also needs data access (i.e. a connection string + LINQ to SQL) to do simple tasks such as ValidateUser.
How can I write a membership provider that adheres to the principles of DDD that I've read about in Pro ASP.NET MVC2 Framework by Apress? My one thought was to write another class in my domain project which does all the "work" related to database stuff. In essence I would have double the number of methods. Also, can this work with dependency injection (IoC)?
Hope this isn't too general ...
Look forward to the hive-mind's responses!
Edit: I just noticed in a default MVC2 project there is an AccountController which has a wrapper around an IMembershipService. Is this where my answer lies? The AccountController seems to have no database access component to it.
Asp.net user management features are super invasive.
They even spam database with profile tables and what not.
When I had to implement users management of my application, I successfully avoided all that mess and still was able to use asp.net in-built roles, user identities etc. Moving away from all that though cause my domain is getting smart enough to decide what can be seen and done so it makes no sense to duplicate that in UI client.
So... yeah. Still have zero problems with this approach. Haven't changed anything for ~4 months.
Works like a charm.
I need a very specialized CRM
Do I
I want to recode the entire layout of sugar crm. whats the best way to start.
write a separate application and update SugarCRM via API calls
Can you be more specific about "very specialized CRM" ?
1.) You can customize all the field, drop down menus, layouts using the studio.
Check out:
http://developers.sugarcrm.com/docs/OS/6.1/-docs-Developer_Guides-Sugar_Developer_Guide_6.1.0-Chapter%204%20Customizing%20Sugar.html
Since you have decided to use SugarCRM don't develop UI outside SugarCRM. Since SugarCRM is very extensible and basicly every view in it can be replaced with any smarty tempalte/html page then there is no reason not to use it's functionalities especialy something like privilidges, home dashboards etc.
So my answer is go with SugarCRM customization.
If you are looking to re-write the whole MVC architecture of Sugar, I would write your own system based off a PHP MVC framework like Zend or CakePHP, if you are just looking to create specialized fields, and maybe tweak some layouts or something, I would recommend SugarCRM, because created fields and adding them to a basic 2 column form layout is quite simple. Even extending the current views is pretty easy if you have a solid grasp of OOPHP and the MVC architecture. Without knowing all your needs here, I'd be very surprised if you had to write a whole custom system. Almost Everything can be extended and customized in an upgrade safe way, which leaves you open to gaining the benefits of the new SugarCRM releases when they come out with out losing your custom enhancements.
I see a lot of articles and posts on how to create a custom MembershipProvider, but haven't found any explanation as to why I must/should use it in my MVC2 web app. Apart from "Hey, security is hard!", what are critical parts of the whole MembershipProvider subsystem that I should know about that I don't, because I've only read about how to override parts of it? Is there some "behind the scenes magic" that I don't see and will have to implement myself? Is there some attribute or other piece of functionality that will trip over itself without a properly setup MembershipProvider?
I am building a web app, using a DDD approach, so the way I see it, I have a User entity and a Group entity. I don't need to customize ValidateUser() under the provider; I can just have it as a method on my User entity. I have to have a User object anyways, to implement things not under the MemebrshipProvider?
So, what gives? :)
No, you don't need it. I have sites that use it and sites that don't. One reason to use it is that plumbing is already there for it in ASP.NET and you can easily implement authentication by simply providing the proper configuration items (and setting up the DB or AD or whatever).
A RoleProvider, on the other hand, comes in very handy when using the built-in AuthorizeAttributes and derivatives. Implementing a RoleProvider will save you a fair amount of custom programming on the authorization side.