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I am trying to find the best way to layout my MVC 3 project. When searching online I came across a suggestion that basically said right click on project and add area. What this did was create an area folder with same controller/view/model structure in the same project. This is not what I want. I want the flexibility of having separate projects. I will keep only the views in the main web project. Everything else in a separate project.

Towards that attempt I created a separate project for my controllers. Now I am stuck with pointing a controller action to a view. In all the online examples it was right click and add view. This being a class library project I don't have that flexibility. Where am I going wrong?

All examples that I have found including the ones I have gone through on Asp.net basically explain how to create study applications, which is only good for learning purposes. A large commercial application can't possibly have all the views/models/controllers in one project. Or is that the way it is supposed to go in MVC? I am not sure if doing everything with mouse clicks is also a good idea. In the webforms world also there were a lot of study-for-beginners applications that used mouse clicks to create basic CRUD applications, but in real commercial projects, we never used those methods.

What are your thoughts, guidance on this?

Thanks for your time...

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    Why can't a large commercial application have all the views, models, and controllers in one project? Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 14:30
  • Can they? Do they? Has anyone had any experience putting everything in one project and had no issues with doing it that way in the long run? In a web forms project, the code behind would call the app layer or business layer which was in a separate project. Is that not done here in the asp.net MVC world? I'm not averse to putting everything in one project. All I need is the guidance from someone with the experience in doing it that way... and confirming that it is the best way.. or at least one of the better ways. Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 19:13

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MVC is based on a convention; the convention is you put all the views on /views, the models in /models and the controllers in /controllers. You can change the convention but it will not make your life easier.

From a conceptual point of view this does make sense. If you keep all domain logic and data access in separate projects all you are left with is the web related stuff, your controllers, view models and views. That's your MVC project.

Note that if you want to split off parts into separate projects you may find portable areas useful.

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Isn't areas for MVC 3 supported by Microsoft? How come I can't seem to find any documentation on the same on MSDN or asp.net or any microsoft site?
Sure, it's fully supported. I'm not sure about docs on MSDN or other sites, I prefer to read books to get a solid base of knowledge about a technology (see my answer to a somewhat related question ).
Btw, a quick google search yields this walktrough on MSDN and an introductory video on asp.net.
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I don't see why you can't use the built in generators as a base for your views and controllers? Nothing says that you have to leave them as generated. I personally thinks that's it's really nice to get a base generated for me (with mouse clicks).

The MVC project is just a UI layer. It's madness to put logic in it for large scale applications. It's therefore usually fine to have one project for all the UI. It actually makes it easier to get an overview of the UI.

That said, there are ways to get a plugin based solution where you can move the controllers (, models and views) to class libraries. But it's not easy.

  1. You need to create a virtual path provider (to find the views)
  2. Make all views embedded
  3. Modify the project file to get the "Add view" dialog etc.
  4. Use areas (makes it easier)
  5. Tell the BuildManager that your plugin DLL exists.

You also need to modify the virtual path provider to access the views from your plugin folders if you want to be able to modify the views during runtime in visual studio. Any change would otherwise require a rebuild of the plugin DLL.

Update

Video for MVC2 (MVC3 areas works the same): http://www.asp.net/mvc/videos/mvc-2/how-do-i/aspnet-mvc-2-areas

Do note that that video is for areas in the same project. Having areas in separate class libraries are more complex. The easiest solution is to use the portable areas as suggested by someone else.

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any step by step documentation by Microsoft on using Areas for MVC 3?
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Why keep only your views in the 'main web project' - I think you are missing the point with MVC.

It's the controllers that are your 'main web' part. They are what your users request and post back to, not the view.

The view is only there to provide a means to layout HTML for the controller to push to the browser.

The Models which I think should really be ViewModels, are there to provide substance (i.e. real data) for your views.

So you can see that the MVC layout really wants all three of these to be grouped sensibly together. Controllers interact with your user, get the view (the layout) and populate it with your ViewModel/Model (the data). This is your user interface, all three parts of MVC (if you go with the ViewModel anyway) are only for UI.

Where the data comes from, your real models and whatever you want to do with it can easily reside in a dll somewhere or on the other side of a set of web services or whatever.

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So say that I keep the Views and the Controllers in the same web project. But then I move out the models into a separate class library project. My data access layer in a separate class library project and the Business layer in a separate class library project. Would that be a good practice from your experience? I am still to fully try out Areas.. but I'd hate to think that is the only way..
My policy is never to use real domain models in the UI, I only use ViewModels which are models that are specifically designed for the UI rather than models that meet my domain requirements. These view models don't need to map directly to domain models, they pick and choose properties from the domain models for display. This leads to quite a bit of 'mapping' code but you can use automapper to reduce this burden. The domain models can now be anywhere, in a layer, in a web service, in another technology altogether. The things I keep in the web project are views, controllers and view models......
....continued - that way the web project (view, viewmodel, controller) is really just whatever UI I want to lay over my domain. If I want to do something different, like a mobile app, I have the choice to build the mobile UI into the web project OR create another web project for the mobile app, both apps still use the same domain services though. Not many examples use the viewmodel concept which I think leads to the UI and domain being tied together too much.

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