Introduction to Templates in ASP.NET MVC 2 Screen cast

I have recorded some screen casts during the last week for Microsoft, one is was published today on Channel 9 (The Screen cast is in Swedish, I will eventually try to record screen casts also in English, but when that happens, I don’t now). You can found the screen cast here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/MSDNSweden/Introduktion-till-Template-i-ASPNET-MVC-2/

For those who can’t understand Swedish, here is a short summary of the screen cast.

With ASP.NET MVC version 2.0 we can use templates. It will help us rendering forms etc out form the Model we passed to the View. We can easy modify templates to satisfy our needs. The simples way to use the Template feature is to use the Html’s DisplayForModel method:

<%= Html.DisplayForModel() %>

This method will iterate through the ViewData.ModelMetadata.Properties to render the Model. The ModelMetadata hold information about the model, such as properties etc. The result will remind us about the DetailView control shipped with ASP.NET 2.0, but will put the name of the property at top, and then a new line with the value of the property, like this:

FirstName

John

LastName

Doe

There is also a method to render a editable from, EditorForModel. By default the methods will use a default template, we can easy override the template. We do that by adding a ASP.NET MVC User Control to the ~/Views/ControllerName/DisplayTemplates or EditTemplates folder. If you want to override how a String should be “rendered”, then you simply add a String.ascx file to the Templates folders, here is an example of a DisplayTemplate:

The above template will make the value of the rendered property to use italic:

FirstName

John

LastName

Doe

We can do several more stuffs with template, for more information check out the following blog post from Brad Wilson:

You can find me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fredrikn