In a SO response to a different question, a user stated that it allowed you to avoid hard-coding route values into a html link tag, but that is not really valid since you have to put in the controller, action, area, etc as strings so you are still hard-coding the route values.
How is this:
#Html.ActionLink(linkText: "MyLink", actionName: "MyAction", controllerName: "MyController", new { id = #myId }, new { area = "SomeArea"})
better than this:
<a href='/SomeArea/MyController/MyAction/myId'>MyLink</a>
Your observation is only true if (a) you're using strictly the default routing format and (b) if your application will always be installed at the root of the site. If you don't do the former (say create a short cut route /help which goes to the Home controller and Help action, and subsequently change it by introducing a Help controller with more actions, then you'll need to update all of your hard-coded anchor tags. A better alternative is using the RouteLink helper with the route name and, optionally, other parameters.
With regard to the latter, I typically use a single server for most of my staging deployments and the application does NOT sit at the site root, but rather in a subdirectory. Production deployment is mixed, but many applications get installed at the site root. Using the helpers allows me to ignore the difference during development as the helper properly constructs the url relative to the current site in all cases. This is so helpful that I even use it for scripts, css files, images, etc. via the UrlHelper to make sure that any paths specified for those do not break between staging and production.
There seems to be little to benefit in using the helper, providing you make one change - add a tilda so that the router automatically resolves the address to the correct place.
<a href='~/SomeArea/MyController/MyAction/myId'>MyLink</a>
Related
I see people using Html.ActionLink() and Url.RouteUrl() etc. etc.
But surely this will lead to a maintenance nightmare if routes need to be redesigned?
How are people organising the generation of URLs in a typesafe and manageable way?
Strongly typed URL generation via lambda expressions was available for a period of time during the MVC 1.0 beta timeframe. It was removed since the MVC architecture does not actually have a 1-to-1 mapping between action names and controller method names. See this Phil Haack blog post for details.
It is of course still possible to do it, and assuming you're not using action names that differ from method names, it should work fine.
You can use T4MVC to generate typesafe checks at compile time for your MVC urls.
T4MVC analyses your Controller classes, and generates code that will generate typesafe url's.
Instead of
#Html.ActionLink("New customer", "Create", new { Controller = "Customer", orgID = orgID })
You can use code like:
#Html.ActionLink("New customer", MVC.Customer.Create(orgID))
If you want to call a action you use the Html.ActionLink(). This will create a <a href="..." ></a> hyperlink to chosen action.
If you want to create a url and use it not for a hyperlink, you can use the Url.Content() or the Url.RouteUrl(). The content accepts a string and gerenates a safe url. The Route url takes a route object.
A bit of context: I need to cache the homepage of my CakePHP site - apart from one small part, which displays events local to the user based on their IP address.
You can obviously use the <cake:nocache> tag to dictate a part of the page that shouldn't be cached; but you can't surround a controller-set variable with these tags to make it dynamic. Once a page is cached, that's it for the controller action, as far as I know.
What you can usefully surround with the nocache tags are elements and helpers. As such, I've created an element inside these tags, which calls a helper function to access the model and get the appropriate data. To get at the model from the helper I'm using:
$this->Modelname =& ClassRegistry::init("Modelname");
This seems to me, however, to be a kind of iffy way of doing things, both in terms of CakePHP and general MVC principles. So my question is, is this an appropriate way of getting what I want to do done, or should it ring warning bells? Is there a much better way of achieving my objectives that I'm just missing here?
Rather than using a Helper, try to put your code in an element and use requestAction inside of the element.
see this link
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/gwoo/2007/04/12/creating-reusable-elements-with-requestaction
This would be a much better approach than trying to use a model in your helper.
Other than breaking all the carefully-laid principles of MVC?
In addition to putting this item into an element, why not fetch it with a trivial bit of ajax?
Put the call in its own controller action, such that the destination URL -> /controller/action (quite convenient!)
Pass the IP back to that action for use in the find call
Set the ajax update callback to target within the element with the results of the call accordingly
No need to muck around calling Models directly from Views, and no need to bog things down with requestAction. :)
HTH
what is the best practice for serving images from a different sub-domain(like media.host.com) in cakePHP? Should I put the images in the img folder provided by cakephp and make this folder the document root of the sub-domain, or is there a better way of doing this?
Roland.
I don't think it matters as long as the images are in the same place. In any case you can't use $html->image() as is, or you can but it's probably wiser to modify it or roll your own helper so that you don't have to always give it the full path. While you're doing that you can just make it use whatever url root you want.
all you need to do is set IMAGES_URL constant before cake does, or even overload image() in AppHelper. if you are some how using array urls for images you would also need to overload url() in AppHelper
I personally just created a separate subdomain pointing to the Cake webroot, which would only serve static files (so deny Cake's index.php, for example). A custom webroot() method in AppHelper modifies the URL for every returned webroot path (script(), image() and css() all use this) so no further code changes are needed.
I wrote a short article about it here: http://metaphoric.nl/blog/serving-static-content-from-a-separate-subdomain-in-cakephp
I switched from Intelligencia's UrlRewriter to the new web forms routing in ASP.NET 4.0. I have it working great for basic pages, however, in my e-commerce site, when browsing category pages, I previously used querystrings that were built into my pager control to control paging and now am not sure how to handle this using routing.
I defined a MapPageRoute as:
routes.MapPageRoute("cat-browse", "Category/{name}_{id}", ~/CategoryPage.aspx");
This works great. Now, somebody clicks to go to page 2. Previously I would have just tacked on ?page=2 to the url. How do I handle this using web forms routing? I know I can do something like:
http://www.mysite.com/Category/Arts-and-Crafts_17/page/2
But in addition to page, I can have filters, age ranges, gender, etc.
Should I just keep defining routes
that handle these variables like
above?
Should I continue using querystrings
and if so, how do you define a route
to handle that?
The main reason to use url routing is to expose clean, user-and-SEO-friendly, URLs. If this is your goal, then try to stick to it and not use querystring parameters. Note: I don't believe we need to completely ban the use of querystrings and, depending on your situation, you may decide it best to use querystring parameters for parameters that are not used frequently, or where no real value is added by making the information more semantically meaningful.
So here's what I would do:
Define a catch-all for all your other parameters:
routes.MapPageRoute("cat-browse", "Category/{name}_{id}/{*queryvalues}", "~/CategoryPage.aspx");
In /CategoryPage.aspx, access the router parameter and then parse as appropriate:
Page.RouteData.Values["queryvalues"]
Instead of using the syntax of Arts-and-Crafts_17/**page/2/age/34** for these parameters, I perfer to use the following syntax: Arts-and-Crafts_17/pg-2/age-34/
If you do this, the catch-all parameter 'querystring', will equal pg-2/age-34. You can now easily parse this data and add each name/value to the page context. Note that you will need to do something along these lines since each of these parameters are optional on your site.
You can take advantage of C# 4.0 named and optional parameters. Please have a look at this example from haacked
If you are using a lower version of the framework, you can also use code from the link above. But instead of declaring the method as
public ActionResult Search(int? page=0)
{}
you can declare it as
public ActionResult Search(int? page)
{
if(page == null)
{
page=0;
}
}
HTH
I'm using a web application project.
I have a folder in my web root called Users and in the folder I have a page called UserList.aspx
What I want to be able to do is type in Response.Redirect(Users.UserList.URL)
What I reckon I can probably do is create a class that extends Page and add a static property called URL that calls MethodInfo.GetCurrentMethod().ReflectedType (I think this works haven't tested) and then have that convert Users.UserList -> ~/Users/UserList.aspx
The problems with this method that I know of are one I need to go through every page and make it extend the base class and it doesn't work with any pages that contain a '-' character.
The advantages are that if pages are moved around then there aren't any broken links (Resharper gives out when there is a Page with the wrong namespace).
Also then every individual page that takes query string params could have a static method so that if I want to add/remove params I can see what uses those params etc.
Also if I want to call that page I don't have to check the name of the params e.g. UserId userId, Id or id. So that would look something like Users.ViewUser.GetUrl(1) -> ~/Users/ViewUser.aspx?UserId=1
So the question is: Is there a better way of doing this? Or is this a bad idea in principal?
You could just create an extension method for the base Page class that does what you are thinking. That would avoid having to go back and modify the base class for all your pages.
There is a better way. Create a traffic cop that knows about paths. Then if paths change, your data model changes or other stuff you just change that one place. Plus you could have read from a config file and make changes at run time.
Thus your call looks like this:
Repose.Redirect(TrafficCop["Users.UserList"].URL)
or some other way if you don't like the syntax.
The MethodInfo.GetCurrentMethod().ReflectedType doesn't work so I came up with another method of doing this using generics.
Instead of Users.ViewUser.GetUrl() or Users.ViewUser.URL it's GetUrl()
For a page with parameters it's still Users.ViewUser.GetUrl(1), it isn't ideal because they should both have the same way of being called but better than strings I guess.
Going to leave the question open for a while just in case.
edidt: I think I will actually just create another method called GetUrl(String getQuery) because if I have two parameters that are of the same type it doesn't work very well.
further edit: I found out how to do exactly what I want to do.
created a class called BasePage:Page where T : Page
on that are the static methods redirect and geturl
each page inherits from the base page as follows: MyPage:BasePage
Any page can redirect to that page by using the command MyPage.Redirect();