ASP.NET MVC - CMS Questions

I'm looking at developing an application that will include a CMS. I'm a seasoned web forms developer but only really just moving into MVC.

I have a couple of questions that I hope some of you guys can answer:

First, my current web form开发者_如何学Pythons CMS allows users to create a page, and then "drop" any number of user controls onto that page they have created. The way I do this is to create an entry in the DB together with the path and then use the LoadControl method.

I can see I can do this with partial views, but partial views have no code behind. If I've potentially got 100 controls that people can drop onto a page, does this mean that the ViewBag in the controller needs to cater for all 100 controls just in case they are used on the view? For example, a web forms user control will contain logic: rptItems.DataSource = blah; rptItems.DataBind()

With MVC, I'm assuming that logic will be in the view controller and the view would access it by the ViewBag? I'm a little confused at how to do this.

Secondly, how would you handle deep routing?

EG:

Store/Products/Category is fine, but what about Store/Products/Category/Delivery/UK ? Would I need to set up a route in global.asax for each route I need? In web forms, I just called the ReWritePath method and handled the routing myself using regular expressions.

Thanks for the time to read this, and hopefully answer some of my queries

For your second question, (ie, "deep routing"), you can handle this within your controller instead of adding real routes. Each part of the url is available via the RouteData.Values collection inside of your controller action. So, your route may look like

~/Store/Products/Category/{*params}

Assuming typical route configuration, this would call the Category(...) action method on ~/areas/store/controllers/storeController, which could then grap delivery and uk from the RouteData.Values collection.

There are a lot of other approaches to this - storing routes in a database and using associated metadata to find the correct controller and method - but I think this is the simplest. Also, it may be obvious, but if you really only need two parameters beyond 'Category' in your example, you could just use

public ActionResult Category(string category, string region)
{
...
}

and a route:

~/store/{controller}/{action}/{category}/{region}/{*params}

Delivery and UK would be mapped to the the category and region parameters, respectively. Anything beyond uk would still be available via the RouteData.Values collection. This assumes that you don't have more specific routes, like

~/store/{controller}/{action}/{category}/{region}/{foo}/{bar}/{long_url}/{etc}

that would be a better match. ({*params} might conflict with the second route; you'll have to investigate to see if it's a problem.)

For your first question:

You can dynamically generate the view source and return it as a string from the controller, eliminating the need to pass a lot of stuff via ViewBag. If a virtual page from your CMS database requires inclusion of partial views, you would add the references to those components when generating the page. (This may or may not address your problem - if not, please provide more information.)