Is an ASP.net MVC View a "class"?

Question

...before everything, I'm doing this out of curiosity only. Nothing real-world application here, but just for knowledge and tinkering about...

ASP.NET Views have properties like Model and ViewData and even has methods as well.

You can even use @Using just like a regular class.cs file.

I know that it is of type WebPageView<TModel>

My main question is: is it a class?

It should be because it's a type, but..

I should be able to also do this then (Razor engine):

@{
   public class Person
   {
       //etc...
   }

   var p = new Person();
}

<span>@p.Name</span>

However I can't.. why?

note: currently a C#, ASP.net beginner.

Answer 1

Sure, you need to use the functions keyword in order to drop down to exposing class-level things like fields, properties, methods, and inner types:

@functions {
   public class Person
   {
       public string Name { get; set; }
   }
}

@{
   var p = new Person();
}

<span>@p.Name</span>

This will work just fine.

That being said, keep in mind that the only purpose of these inner classes is if you need to define a type only for use within a view. Myself, I've never found a need to do this for classes. However, I have taken advantage of this technique to add new methods that are not syntactically possible with helper methods.

Answer 2

You can't do it because Razor markup is compiled into a sequence of statements inside a method within the generated class derived from WebViewPage or WebViewPage<TModel>

The more important question though, is why would you want to do this? Instead prefer to keep Razor free of this kind of logic - it's job should be to produce layout, not do any kind of business logic, or business data transformation. Do all the heavy lifting in your action method and deliver a Model that describes the data required to render the layout in a format that requires only simple Razor markup to process.

There are quite a few tutorials a round that describe how to approach MVC and Razor. I dug up this one that is brief but does a reasonable job of covering an end-to-end story that might help you get the idea. It does include using EF to get data as well which might be more that you were bargaining for - but it's worth a read to get the full picture of how a whole architecture hangs together: http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/01/06/developing-web-apps-using-asp-net-mvc-3-razor-and-ef-code-first-part-1.aspx