MVC4在运行时构建视图

Question

I have written a WPF desktop app where the layout of the view(s) is generated at runtime based on a configuration in a database. A new requirement has arisen where they want to expose the same layouts via the web.

As far as I can see I have two options

• Generate the MVC view at runtime
• Code the layouts in separate views and bind the data through the normal model binding mechanism.

I can see the first option could be quite complex (I'm all for simplicity) and I'm not sure how the model binding would work. The second option will be much simpler but will result in much more "boiler plate" code that needs to be enhanced \\ maintained.

Does anyone have any previous experience with generating Razor views at runtime or is this something that I should avoid?

Answer 1

This is do-able via a mix of T4 templates and run-time compilation -- but I'm not sure that I would recommend it. Another route that I would recommend would be to generate JavaScript templates on the server-side that could be rendered on the client. There is a wide variety of templating libraries out there. Because you are using MVC, it would not be that difficult to treat your actions within the controllers as endpoints that you could call asynchronously.