eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

Ramblings of Matt

ASP.NET MVC - Living in a Web Forms World

May 9, 2008 08:59 by matthaw

For the life of me, I seem to have Journey stuck in my head when I was thinking about writing this post, and as such the title reflects that! Anyway, onto the post...

 

When developing ASP.NET MVC applications, most examples or sites have shown you starting from complete scratch. This is all and well if you have the time to completely re-write an existing application for 6+ months or have started a v1 product. Right, in the "real-world" the former rarely happens and if your a developer wanting to stay on the bleeding edge, introducing a new architecture into an existing ASP.NET application is fairly tedious. From converting existing pages, supporting legacy routes, and possibly the lack of allowing multiple forms all prove to be a challenge.


Layout

As you know, I'm currently working on the CodePlex team and my biggest task I'm working on is slowly converting the site to use ASP.NET MVC. If you've been to this site, you know how extensive the site is, and how this challenge is very daunting. The one saving grace is that we can do it gradually since we release so often. But, because of this we have to take small steps converting pages (views!) that we can - while maintaining our original master page and other postback functionality. For this post, I'll use CodePlex as a reference point.

 

We have 2 major sections that we're to worry about while working with ASP.NET MVC. Most importantly, we still have a single form on the page! This is a critical piece of information, because this limitation required us to make decisions we did to get around ASP.NET MVC within a Web Forms world. When working on a MVC view, we render everything within a main content section, and do not use ASP.NET server controls at all. The site also contains a project search on each page but this, however, still relies upon that singe form and the normal Postback model.

 

Views

Like any web application, you have content pages and you have forms based pages. CodePlex is no different. When converting each of these types, obviously, the former of the two is the easiest to convert. Why? Well, you don't have to worry about that single form tag and there's no need of posting data back to the server. So, when working with true content pages - converting them is as simple as creating your controller, action, and view. Now, just because you're still in a Web Forms model, still does not give you the right to continue to use ASP.NET server controls!

 

The most challenging portion is working with forms based pages. If you were building a new ASP.NET MVC application from the ground-up, you wouldn't have to think twice about this problem. The reason is that when you create your forms based pages, each logical form has it's own form! Astounding, isn't it. Yes, we've been living in that world of ASP.NET Web Forms world wherein you can have 1 and only 1 form tag (with a runat="server"). Since the application still has this single form tag in place, and we still need to respond to master page events (like project searches) we have to be very mindful of how its done. The biggest challenge is that, if you know the ASP.NET MVC lifecycle, it goes

  1. HTTP Request arrives
  2. Routing HTTP Handler executes, matching based on routes
  3. MVC Route Handler executes controller & action
  4. The ViewPage is rendered (assuming your calling RenderView)
  5. The ASP.NET page life cycle is invoked (assuming your using the default view engine)

Do you see the problem? No? Okay, well its the fact that upon a HTTP Post, your Action method is invoked prior to any event occurring within the ASP.NET lifecycle. That means, at an Action method level - you have absolutely no idea if your MVC form was submitted or was it that pesky Project search. Well, this isn't entirely true because how to get around this is by having a hidden input field in which you set a value when your MVC based form is submitted. I'll show a little later how this is used, but you can probably figure out how.

   1:  <input type="hidden" id="mvcFormSubmitted" name="mvcFormSubmitted" value="" />
   2:  <label for="UserName">User Name:</label><br />
   3:  <%= Html.TextBox("UserName", ViewData["UserName"]) %><br />
   4:  <label for="Password">Password:</label><br />
   5:  <%= Html.Password("Password") %><br />
   6:  <%= ViewData["ErrorMessage"] %><br />
   7:  <%= Html.SubmitButton("submitButton", "Login", new { onclick = "mvcFormSubmit(); " }) %>
   8:   
   9:  <script type="text/javascript">
  10:  function mvcFormSubmit() {
  11:     $get('mvcFormSubmitted').value = 'true';
  12:  }
  13:  </script>

Routing

As you can imagine, routing has become a bit of a nightmare. Why? Well, since we still have to abide by the Postback model, our Views always postback to themselves. For example, /site/login will post to /site/login vs. /site/login posting to /site/processLogin. At first glance, you might think "okay, I'll just check to see if the http method is of type POST within my login action." That would work, but the correct method, which supports later migration away from a Web Forms world, is to have two separate actions. To handle this scenario, you simply use constraints on the HttpMethod within your route definition:

   1:  routes.MapRoute("GET Login", "/site/login", 
   2:                  new { controller = "session", action = "login" }
   3:                  new { httpmethod = "GET" });
   4:   
   5:  routes.MapRoute("POST Login", "/site/login",
   6:                 new { controller = "session", action = "processLogin" }
   7:                 new { httpmethod = "POST" }

Now, when your clients request /site/login, the login action will execute, and upon a POST to /site/login, the processLogin action will execute. Another scenario you should consider at this time, is that if you are converting a previous page, say "/Users/Login.aspx" you would want all subsequent requests to be routed to /site/login. To handle this, you can utilize my Legacy Routing methodology that would send a 301 http status code pointing the client to the new url.

   1:  routes.Add("", new LegacyRoute(
   2:     "Users/Login.aspx",
   3:     "GET Login",
   4:     new LegacyRouteHandler());

Controller Actions

Now it's time to put these two things together. Granted, if you were doing true TDD development, you would have started with your controller & actions, but for the purposes of this post I left it at the very end to show how everything comes together. So a few things to remember, is that we are now assured that our login and processLogin action will execute at the correct time. We also have a hidden input field in which we can determine if it was my form submission that caused the postback, or was it some other control on the master page. So, here's how things should look like:

   1:  public class SessionsController : Controller
   2:  {
   3:     public ActionResult Login()
   4:     {
   5:        if (TempData["ErrorMessage"] != null)
   6:        {
   7:            ViewData["UserName"] = TempData["UserName"];
   8:        }
   9:        return RenderView();
  10:     }
  11:   
  12:     public ActionResult ProcessLogin()
  13:     {
  14:        if (Request.Form["mvcFormSubmitted"] != "true")
  15:           return RenderView("Login");
  16:   
  17:        string userName = Request.Form["UserName"];
  18:        string password = Request.Form["Password"];
  19:        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(userName) || string.IsNullOrEmpty(password))
  20:        {
  21:           TempData["ErrorMessage"] = "Username and Password not valid.";
  22:           TempData["UserName"] = userName;
  23:           return RedirectToAction("Login");
  24:        }
  25:   
  26:        // process login
  27:        return Redirect("~/home");
  28:     }
  29:  }

As example, I've followed the PRG pattern that I've previously mentioned, but there's one thing here that breaks that pattern. It's the RenderView("Login") if my hidden field does not match. Why do we need to break the pattern here? Well remember the lifecycle I previously mentioned. The only way for events to be fired from your master page, is that it too needs to "postback", thus falling back into the postback model. Once you can safely ditch the singe form, that code can be safely removed.

 

Final Thoughts

As you can tell, having a mixture of ASP.NET WebForms and MVC forms is not a trivial task. There's a lot to consider when tackling this, and if at all possible SPIKE! Yes, spike your master pages so that you can have a Web Forms master page AND a MVC master page. By doing this, you do not have to follow the single form pattern thus negating almost all this post. I would still recommend using the legacy routing to redirect your users to the new page as well as the PRG pattern, but you should always be doing that anyway :) Well, hopefully this post has served its purpose and given you some ideas on how to approach converting existing ASP.NET applications to ASP.NET MVC. If you have any other suggestions or better recommendations, please add a comment!

 

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Comments

May 14. 2008 22:22

Pingback from weblogs.asp.net

ASP.NET MVC - Living in a Web Forms World - eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

weblogs.asp.net

May 15. 2008 09:33

Hi Matt - sounds like you need a hug Smile. Hey if I can help let me know - I'm on my 4th major MVC app and have found some nice tricks...

Rob Conery

May 15. 2008 09:58

So is there any chance of us folks who are still trying to phase off of asp.old (classic) of migrating to Asp.net MVC?

Eric Williams

May 15. 2008 10:30

@Rob - would be good to see a nice blog post on them!

@Eric - Coming from ASP world would be much easier since you don't have to deal with the single form Smile

matthaw

May 15. 2008 14:49

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Wöchentliche Rundablage: ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight 2, TDD, WPF, jQuery… | Code-Inside Blog

code-inside.de

September 19. 2008 13:31

Is a hidden element and clientside code to set the value of the hidden element really required? Inputs of type submit send back their value when you click them so can't you could check for the existence of the button value in the form collection. Inputs of type image send back the x and y coordinates of where they were clicked (so instead of checking for the value, you'd check for either an x or a y).

Seeing as asp.net mvc views are harking back to the days of classic asp, I'll apply the above statement with a little story about when the company I was working for was preparing for a move from classic to flashy new Asp.Net 1.0.  We forced our CMS application to have only one form tag and handle post events in one section of code at the top of the page (or as a SSI added at the top of the page) instead of inline with the html, but there were still lots of form submit buttons that did a specific action (e.g. add, edit, delete, select etc etc) We did initially do the hidden form element thing and did a select statement on the form value for the event that was being attempted, but then I found out about the buttons sending back their value.  So we renamed the buttons that did an action to say "btnAction" and then checked the value of it using a select statement when posted to the server. Eg Request.Form("buttonAction") would equal "Add" or  "Edit" etc based on the text on the button so doing a check on this we'd know what the user was trying to do. Image buttons were handled slightly differently due to what they send and I can't remember if values were sent back with the default button behaviour (i.e. the submit button that is highlighted by default and is actioned when pressing enter)

Kevin

December 16. 2008 06:26

MVC is great but still not mature enough. But the routing namespace provides great possibilities.

Nikolay

March 21. 2009 14:13

Combination, oh well nice

Bayram Çelik

June 16. 2009 04:44

Hi,

Is there any tutorial/blogs/links on how to incorporate asp.net mvc to an existing asp.net web application?


http://tinyurl.com/m2px6r

thanks,
No Body

no body

January 7. 2011 14:56

Using Razor Pages with WebForms Master Pages

Using Razor Pages with WebForms Master Pages

eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

October 20. 2015 10:27

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MVC Recommended Resources And Tutorials | open and free

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