I'm building SPA application using Backbone.js and as its back-end I want to use ASP.NET Web API. I need only one page and this fact brings me a lot of confusion.
ApiController returns json response and as far as I understand there's no need in asp.net-specific views at all. Am I right?
Can I use plain html for my main page? Or should I use *.cshtml and put a call to RenderBody instead?
If choose the first option then how will I handle validation?
Thanks!
Well the trick is that if you want search engines to be able to index your page, or people to be able to share to Facebook with a custom icon/description, etc you'll need to serve back static HTML -- none of those bots are able to run your javascript to render the page as the browser does.
If you're uninterested in this, then yes, you can completely avoid RenderBody.
Related
I am trying to make this feature, and I'm really stuck.
I have two applications that run on the same domain. and I need to have one application load pages from the other one inside it's own (the first) master page.
I have full control of the code of both sides, of course.
I have tries using HTTPRequest, and HTTPResponse, and I have tried using WebBrowser. Both work great as long as I have static(plain HTML) pages. However,
those pages are actually dynamic. the user need to press server-side buttons (postback) and generally use the session, viewstate, and/or cookies.
because of that, HTTPRequest and WebBrowser fail me, as they do not cause postback, and therefore those server-side controls are not working. more so, if I try to "fake" a postback by saving the ViewState after each response and than resend it on the next request, after a few (3-4) times the original page will return a "The state information is invalid for this page and might be corrupted" error, even if I use
EnableViewStateMac ="false" EnableSessionState="True" EnableEventValidation ="false" ValidateRequest ="false" ViewStateEncryptionMode ="Never
So... any ideas how can I solve this issue?
Thanks in advance
What is the main desire here?
Wrap one site's content in another without any architecture changes?
ANSWER: Iframe
Have a single submit button submit from two sites?
ANSWER: Not a good idea. You might be able to kludge this by creating a scraper and parser, but it would only be cool as an "I can do it trophy". Better to rearchitect the solution. But assuming you really want to do this, you will have to parse the result from the embedded site and redirect the submit to the new site. That site will then take the values and submit the form to the first site and wait for the result, which it will scrape to give a response to the user. It is actually quite a bit more complex, as you have to parse the HTML DOM (easier if all of the HTML is XHTML compliant, of course) to figure out what to intercept.
Caveat: Any changes to the embedded site can blow up your code, so the persons who maintain the first site must be aware of this artificially created dependency so they don't change anything that might cause problems. Ouch, that sounds brittle! ;-)
Other?
If using an iFrame does not work, then I would look at the business problem and draw up an ideal architecture to solve it, which might mean making the functionality of the embedded site available via a web service for the second site.
I am using the JQuery UI Modal Form Dialog and trying to save the old data and new data to a database. I am using C# (backend) and ASP.NET front end. I can delete new entries, I just don't know how to save the data. I have tried searching ways to pull pull the HTML data in, but couldn't get rid of the errors. Also Wasn't sure if there was a better method? Here is my JSFiddle
function addUser() {
I need to figure out a way to get the data from the table and post it to the server.
I think what you may be looking for is web methods, it allows the jquery (client side) to call the backend (c#) and for them to interact with each other.
Check out this link for reference:
http://encosia.com/using-jquery-to-directly-call-aspnet-ajax-page-methods/
Here is a brief summary from the website:
When it comes to lightweight client-side communication, I’ve noticed
that many of you prefer ASP.NET AJAX’s page methods to full ASMX web
services. In fact, page methods came up in the very first comment on
my article about using jQuery to consume ASMX web services. Given
their popularity, I’d like to give them their due attention. As a
result of Justin‘s question in those comments, I discovered that you
can call page methods via jQuery. In fact, it turns out that you can
even do it without involving the ScriptManager at all. In this post, I
will clarify exactly what is and isn’t necessary in order to use page
methods. Then, I’ll show you how to use jQuery to call a page method
without using the ScriptManager.
I found this:
This script gets data from the table that you can then parse through.
You could then pass it into a hidden field.
I am trying to make an application that will fill in the info i type into the actual web page so I can register at websites very very easy whenever I need them. However I'm not sure how I would go about this. I know I would either have to use a WebBrowser or an Html request, but I am not sure what the basic syntax for it is. I could really use the help!
EDIT: I am trying to use Document.GetElementByID in order to do this. I don't want to use plugins to do this. I want to go a program.
Look into Browser Helper Objects and how to implement them in .NET. BHO-s can interact with the page loaded into an IE browser.
I am looking for a solution that will allow me to print generic url for a set of pages.
Example:
For pages - site.com/About/Contact.aspx, site.com/About/WhoWeAre.aspx, site.com/About/Members.aspx etc., user should see only site.com/About/ in the address bar.
Is that something achievable? This site is not SEO friendly and requires users to login before accessing content, also I don't expect site.com/About/ or any internal pages to resolve to any page when typed directly on browser. I am also fine if real url is printed on status bar if the user hovers on the internal links. I don't think URL Rewrite or URL Routing works here. Or may be I am missing something. Using .NET 3.5 and C#.
I am tagging sitecore because I am more interested in sitecore based solution where I have different nodes under About tree and I want users to see only upto /About in the address bar, but I think if it can be done in asp.net, I can figure out sitecore part.
As you are interested in sitecore, I can tell you how we have done custom URL in a recent sitecore build.
You need to have a custom link manager by extending the current LinkProvider.LinkBuilder sitecore class. Then you need to add your custom logic on how you would like the URL by overriding GetItemUrl and BuidlItemUrl to display URL and finally and it in the web.config for sitecore to use your custom link manager.
Absolutely, use the asp.net 4 routing engine.
This will give you exactly what you want:
http://weblogs.asp.net/dotnetstories/archive/2011/01/03/routing-in-asp-net-4-0-web-forms.aspx
EDIT: for 3.5 check out:
Friendly URLs for ASP.NET
The only way to solve this, keeping /About in the address bar, would be to create client-side code that switches out the content based on user selection.
You can do that by loading the About page and then load the content for any child pages using a postback or using ajax calls.
You could also put an iframe on the /About page, and have the navigation links point the iframe to the other pages.
I think you might be able to use the target attribute to target the iframe, or use javascript to change the src of the iframe.
One of my friends is working on having a good solution to generate aspx pages, out of html pages generated from a legacy asp application.
The idea is to run the legacy app, capture html output, clean the html using some tool (say HtmlTidy) and parse it/transform it to aspx, (using Xslt or a custom tool) so that existing html elements, divs, images, styles etc gets converted neatly to an aspx page (too much ;) ).
Any existing tools/scripts/utilities to do the same?
Here's what you do.
Define what the legacy app is supposed to do. Write down the scenarios of getting pages, posting forms, navigating, etc.
Write unit test-like scripts for the various scenarios.
Use the Python HTTP client library to exercise the legacy app in your various scripts.
If your scripts work, you (a) actually understand the legacy app, (b) can make it do the various things it's supposed to do, and (c) you can reliably capture the HTML response pages.
Update your scripts to capture the HTML responses.
You have the pages. Now you can think about what you need for your ASPX pages.
Edit the HTML by hand to make it into ASPX.
Write something that uses Beautiful Soup to massage the HTML into a form suitable for ASPX. This might be some replacement of text or tags with <asp:... tags.
Create some other, more useful data structure out of the HTML -- one that reflects the structure and meaning of the pages, not just the HTML tags. Generate the ASPX pages from that more useful structure.
Just found HTML agility pack to be useful enough, as they understand C# better than python.
I know this is an old question, but in a similar situation (50k+ legacy ASP pages that need to display in a .NET framework), I did the following.
Created a rewrite engine (HttpModule) which catches all incoming requests and looks for anything that is from the old site.
(in a separate class - keep things organized!) use WebClient or HttpRequest, etc to open a connection to the old server and download the rendered HTML.
Use the HTML agility toolkit (very slick) to extract the content that I'm interested in - in our case, this is always inside if a div with the class "bdy".
Throw this into a cache - a SQL table in this example.
Each hit checks the cache and either a)retrieves the page and builds the cache entry, or b) just gets the page from the cache.
An aspx page built specifically for displaying legacy content receives the rewrite request and displays the relevant content from the legacy page inside of an asp literal control.
The cache is there for performance - since the first request for a given page has a minimum of two hits - one from the browser to the new server, one from the new server to the old server - I store cachable data on the new server so that subsequent requests don't have to go back to the old server. We also cache images, css, scripts, etc.
It gets messy when you have to handle forms, cookies, etc, but these can all be stored in your cache and passed through to the old server with each request if necessary. I also store content expiration dates and other headers that I get back from the legacy server and am sure to pass those back to the browser when rendering the cached page. Just remember to take as content-agnostic an approach as possible. You're effectively building an in-page web proxy that lets IIS render old ASP the way it wants, and manipulating the output.
Works very well - I have all of the old pages working seamlessly within our ASP.NET app. This saved us a solid year of development time that would have been required if we had to touch every legacy asp page.
Good luck!