October 2012
Intermediate to advanced
504 pages
13h 22m
English
book
Professional ASP.NET MVC 4
by Jon Galloway, Phil Haack, Brad Wilson, K. Scott Allen, Scott Hanselman
Content preview from Professional ASP.NET MVC 4
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The Purpose of Views
Chapter 2 demonstrated how controllers can return strings, which are then output to the browser. That's useful for getting started with controllers, but in any non-trivial web application, you'll notice a pattern emerging very quickly: Most controller actions need to display dynamic information in HTML format. If the controller actions are just returning strings, they'll be doing a lot of string substitution, which gets messy fast. A templating system is clearly needed, which is where the view comes in.
The view is responsible for providing the user interface (UI) to the user. It is given a reference to the model (the information the controller needs displayed), and the view transforms that model into a format ready to be presented to the user. In ASP.NET MVC, the view accomplishes this by examining a model object handed off to it by the controller and transforming the contents of that to HTML.
Note
Not all views render HTML. HTML is certainly the most common case when building web applications. But, as the section on action results in Chapter 16 points out, views can render a wide variety of other content types as well.
Let's take a quick look at an example of a view. The following code sample shows a view named Sample.cshtml located at the path /Views/Home/Sample.cshtml. Don't worry about typing this; it's just for illustration.
Listing 3-1: Sample view — Sample.cshtml
@{ Layout = null; } <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head><title>Sample View</title></head> ...Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.