ASP.NET MVC Project Structure for larger sites

Question

I'm surprised I can't find more discussions out there about an issue that is really bothering me on our project using ASP.NET MVC.

How can you deal with a Visual Studio solution that has multiple projects? The MVC framework has the Models/Views/Controllers folder in the main project. But what if you want to break up your solution into multiple projects along logical groupings and bring the models/views/controllers along with it? When I think ahead to the end of the project, there will be many classes in each of these folders. It doesn’t paint a cleanly organized structure that will aid maintenance. We’d like a way to either move the classes to the projects that they relate to or at least use a folder structure to aid in the organization.

I assume that one option would be to use the same namespace in all of the other projects as is used by the main project, but I’m not a huge fan of that approach b/c this is not the approach that we’ve normally taken when defining our namespace.

I suppose we could at least create sub folders inside of the M/V/C folders and not carry forward the folder names to the namespaces. I’m assuming then that the classes could be found?

Some background on our project: It is a public facing web site that has many business transactions that the user can perform (about 50-60). Each transaction has a series of web pages that the user navigates through, in order to accomplish the different services provided by the site. We are using a single controller for each transaction (there have been long discussions on whether we should have a controller defined for each transaction or if we should use a higher level grouping and therefore reduce the number of controllers, but some information that we've encountered on the web (http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2008/12/03/the-fat-controller.aspx) brought us to this decision.)

What are some recommendations? Have others solved this issue in a way that they are happy with?

Thanks Jon.

Answer 1

Have a look at Areas.

Areas is a concept borrowed from MonoRail, which organizes controllers into logical folders.

http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/04/areas-in-aspnetmvc.aspx

Answer 2

Areas are supported in Asp.Net MVC2.

Scott Gu has a blog talking about the Area Support here.

From his post.

Each area can be implemented as a separate ASP.NET MVC project which can then be referenced by the main application. This helps manage the complexity when building a large application and facilitates multiple teams working together on a single application together