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Creating Views with no Code Behind

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simonthorogood edited this page Dec 18, 2010 · 1 revision

You can create views without having any of the code-behind files by using the ResourceView<T> base class.

Using the Resource property of the ResourceView

To use a ResourceView, you have two options. You can create New OpenRasta View from the Add New Item context menu (if using the Visual Studio integration).

If you’re not using the VS integration for some reason, you can also create a new WebForm longhand and edit it with these three steps:

  1. Delete the code-behind .aspx.cs and .aspx.designer.cs
  2. Remove the <form>...</form> tags from the <body>.
  3. Edit the <%@ Page ... %> directive by removing the AutoWireup and CodeBehind attributes and change the Inherits attribute to OpenRasta.Codecs.WebForms.ResourceView<TypeOfResource>. When you are finished, your <%@ Page ... %> directive should look like this:
<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="OpenRasta.Codecs.WebForms.ResourceView<TypeOfResource>" %>

Accessing the Resource of a !ResourceView

The !ResourceView exposes a Resource property that is strongly-typed to the generic argument to the !ResourceView. You can use this property to access instance members of your Resource. For example, if you have a

public class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

and set your .aspx view to inherit from ResourceView<Person>, you can access the members of your resource with the Resource property like so:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="OpenRasta.Codecs.WebForms.ResourceView<Person>" %>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
    <title>Person named <%= Resource.LastName %></title>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
        <p>This is the page of <%= Resource.FirstName %></p>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Intellisense will provide the properties of Resource for you.

Keeping the view tidy

To keep your views clean, you should also add these namespaces to your web.config (again, you won’t need to if using a project created with the VS integration):

  <pages pageParserFilterType="OpenRasta.Codecs.WebForms.OpenRastaPageParserFilter">
    <namespaces>
      <add namespace="System.Collections.Generic"/>
      <add namespace="OpenRasta.Web"/>
      <add namespace="OpenRasta.Web.Markup"/>
      <add namespace="OpenRasta.Codecs.WebForms"/>
      <add namespace="MyRestApplication.Resources"/> <!-- replace with your project namespace -->
    </namespaces>
    ...
  </pages>

Why get rid of the code-behind?

In short, cleanliness. Why code what you don’t need to? When you can represent all you need to with ResourceView<T> there’s no need for a couple of extra files cluttering your source control system.

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