ASP.NET MVC Views Extensibility at runtime

Question

We are in the process of moving our application to .NET. One of the main goals is to allow modifications to the application, per client, but not to the source code. We resolved this in the core framework by programming to interfaces and using a Dependency Resolver (having an option to override the base registration) and MEF.

Now when it comes to views (the UI the client sees) the templates seem static and if the client wants to add a new field to the screen it seems they would need to modify the view itself.

The only two things that I can think of is modifying the search path of viewengine. This would allow a copy of the base and changes to it would be picked up. Not really liking this as it's a copy of the code.

The other way, what we are doing now, is that we create a class that is a container to other objects that output HTML. Basically we have a PageObject, LabelObject, InputObject..ect that we can call render on and output HTML. Since they are classes we can use the same methodology as for the rest of the application of giving slice in points. Going this route we really are not using the viewengine for rendering but just for combining all the partial views. Seems kind of clunky.

Is there a different way to accomplish this goal or a different viewengine that I can use to meet the goal of allowing customization for clients without touching the base view? I know HTML is not an object but seems there has to be something in between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC when dealing with HTML and allowing for customizations.

Answer 1

I would create a strongly typed partial view or template (DisplayTemplate or EditorTemplate based on requirements) whose @model is a collection of things that are rendered as inputs and labels. Allow the client to add/remove items from the persisted collection (i.e. in a database) and your problem is solved using the built in ViewEngine.