ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 released

Back in March, I blogged about an experimental MvcSiteMap provider I was building. Today, I am proud to announce that it is stable enough to call it version 1.0! Download MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 over at CodePlex.

Ever since the source code release I did back in March, a lot of new features have been added, such as HtmlHelper extension methods, attributes, dynamic parameters, … I’ll leave most of them up to you to discover, but there are some I want to quickly highlight.

ACL module extensibility

By default, MvcSiteMap will make nodes visible or invisible based on [Authorize] attributes that are placed on controllers or action methods. If you have implemented your own authentication mechanism, this may no longer be the best way to show or hide sitemap nodes. By implementing and registering the IMvcSiteMapAclModule interface, you can now plug in your own visibility logic.

[code:c#]

public interface IMvcSiteMapAclModule
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Determine if a node is accessible for a user
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="provider">The MvcSiteMapProvider requesting the current method</param>
    /// <param name="context">Current HttpContext</param>
    /// <param name="node">SiteMap node</param>
    /// <returns>True/false if the node is accessible</returns>
    bool IsAccessibleToUser(MvcSiteMapProvider provider, HttpContext context, SiteMapNode node);
}

[/code]

Dynamic parameters

Quite often, action methods have parameters that are not really bound to a sitemap node. For instance, take a paging parameter. You may ignore this one safely when determining the active sitemap node: /Products/List?page=1 and /Products/List?page=2 should both have the same menu item highlighted. This is where dynamic parameters come in handy: MvcSiteMap will completely ignore the specified parameters when determining the current node.

[code:c#]

<mvcSiteMapNode title="Products" controller="Products" action="List" isDynamic="true" dynamicParameters="page" />

[/code]

The above sitemap node will always be highlighted, whatever the value of “page” is.

SiteMapTitle action filter attribute

In some situations, you may want to dynamically change the SiteMap.CurrentNode.Title in an action method. This can be done manually by setting  SiteMap.CurrentNode.Title, or by adding the SiteMapTitle action filter attribute.

Imagine you are building a blog and want to use the Blog’s Headline property as the site map node title. You can use the following snippet:

[code:c#]

[SiteMapTitle("Headline")]
public ViewResult Show(int blogId) {
   var blog = _repository.Find(blogIdId);
   return blog;
}

[/code]

You can also use a non-strong typed ViewData value as the site map node title:

[code:c#]

[SiteMapTitle("SomeKey")]
public ViewResult Show(int blogId) {
   ViewData["SomeKey"] = "This will be the title";

   var blog = _repository.Find(blogIdId);
   return blog;
}

[/code]

HtmlHelper extension methods

MvcSiteMap provides different HtmlHelper extension methods which you can use to generate SiteMap-specific HTML code on your ASP.NET MVC views. Here's a list of available HtmlHelper extension methods.

• HtmlHelper.Menu() - Can be used to generate a menu
• HtmlHelper.SiteMap() - Can be used to generate a list of all pages in your sitemap
• HtmlHelper.SiteMapPath() - Can be used to generate a so-called "breadcrumb trail"

The MvcSiteMap release can be found on CodePlex.

This is an imported post. It was imported from my old blog using an automated tool and may contain formatting errors and/or broken images.