Leveraging Razor Templates Outside of ASP NET: Theyre Not Just for HTML Anymore!

In stark contrast, injecting mock and stub objects allows developers to create unit tests that execute in mere milliseconds. As you’ll soon see, the Razor Templating API provides the ability to transform this template into a .NET class and execute it against a model, rendering the output shown below. The Razor codes start with @ and you can either use a Razor expressions or Razor code blocks to insert C# code inside HTML Markup. This gives the programmers the ability to create a dynamic web page using C# features like conditional statements, loops etc. The Razor code blocks start with @ symbol followed by curly braces. The Controller in MVC invokes the View by passing the data to render.

• Declare a variable in a code block enclosed in brackets and then use those variables inside HTML with @ symbol.
• I have witnessed (and even developed) the email generation example many times, and each implementation seems drastically different than the next.
• The RazorTemplateEngine class does most of the heavy lifting to transform Razor template text into usable .NET source code.
• In this article, I’ll show you how to use Roslyn, the .NET compiler, to leverage the Razor Engine in other project types, and define your project in a way that better suits you.

We need to tell the project-builder the namespace we would like our new compilation to use. Because this value is being passed through from the public method CompileTemplate, the actual values for this will be defined in the host project, which we’ll come back to later. Although the code is a bit complex looking, there’s not really much that we, as consumers of this API, need to get too involved in. All we’re doing here is saying “let’s create an empty file system and create a default empty project”. Both parts of the template are expected to live in the project (assembly) that is calling the engine – not the RazorEngine project directly.

Leveraging Razor Templates Outside of ASP.NET: They’re Not Just for HTML Anymore!

In this demo, the definition of razorTemplateBaseFolder has been hard-coded for simplicity. If you use this code in your real-life solutions, I would consider making this configurable – e.g. combining with appSettings configuration. I have included the class SampleEmailTemplateCollectionItem, which is there purely to demonstrate iteration in the view using a strongly-typed object. Seasoned MVC developers may have noticed that we are using the @inherits keyword and not @model.

The Visual Studio Intelligence support also helps with Razor syntax. You can replace or add to the physical file provider in the razor view options setup with your own custom provider to load views from database, web service call, etc. There is no MVC in that piece of code, so, no View, no .cshtml files, no Controller, just Razor source parsing and compiled runtime execution. The rendering method takes a view path, model and a controller context to retrieve the view using the active RazorViewEngine of the application.

Razor View Engine & Razor Syntax in ASP.NET Core

You may have noticed that, nestled amongst the other library references, is an item called referenceToCallingAssembly. This is a reference to the host project, that is passed as an object argument from the main public method CompileTemplate to the private method CompileDynamicAssembly. We’re going to be creating a template base model that will contain basic methods for creating our output. Let’s create the razor class library project which will house the .cshtml files. It starts with code block and its condition is written in parenthesis and the code which needs to be executed once condition gets true is written inside braces. Cshtml file extension.The Razor syntax is shorter, simpler and straightforward to find out because it uses the C# or visual basic.

• However, it uses int, float, decimal, bool and string data types.
• Many many moons ago I wrote a post that described how to render Razor views to string in classic ASP.NET MVC.
• The Razor makes it easier to embed the C# code inside the HTML, thus providing the ability to generate the dynamic response.
• Remember, that a single compiled template can be reused over and over again to render many different pages of dynamic content, just like a regular MVC webpage.
• When you don’t have access to an MVC project, you don’t have access to all this built-in behaviour, so we need to recreate the process of rendering a template manually.
• It would have been awesome if Microsoft would have made Razor a standalone templating engine, and then plugged it into ASP.NET.

Here is a solution that is encapsulated for usage outside of an mvc app. It does require package references to aspnet core and mvc, but those are easy to add to a service or console application. RenderToStringAsync is the method to call to render a view to a string. The Razor templating syntax is a very powerful solution to asp net razor tutorial common template-based problems. Since its API is publicly exposed and very easy to use, Razor-based solutions don’t have to be restricted to the ASP.NET runtime. Properly configured, Razor templates can provide an effective and maintainable approach to solving a multitude of templating scenarios within any .NET environment.

Getting Started with Razor Pages: A Better Model for Web Development?

It’s vital to realize ASP.NET MVC uses Razor as a template engine, and that they aren’t the same thing. Using the library RazorEngine.NetCore, we can add powerful templating features to any .NET Core application. The library provides a relatively simple wrapper around Razor with tools like caching, template management, and caching. I hope you found this post helpful, and let me know how you’re using Razor Engine in your projects. Let’s modify our code one more time to take advantage of a newly created Person class. Jump to any file, type, or member in your code base instantly, as well as quickly find settings and actions.

2.What are the advantages of Off-the-shelf software development? Here is a class to get Nate’s answer working as a scoped service in an ASP.NET Core 2.0 project. There’s a working example for .NET Core 1.0 at aspnet/Entropy/samples/Mvc.RenderViewToString. Since this might change or go away, I’ll detail the approach I’m using in my own applications here. The standalone Razor engines I’ve come across (RazorEngine, RazorTemplates) all require full .NET. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

You can think of this process as being a bit like reading a file from a disk byte by byte. As with previous steps, as a consumer of the underlying APIs, the GenerateSyntaxTree method is orchestration code and there isn’t a great deal for us to be getting involved with. This method begins the process of hooking into Microsoft’s Razor engine. We’ll be adding each part of the code to the skeleton project, talking about each in turn.

When you come to work on your own projects, if you’re having problems, make sure to check that you’ve performed this step. The Razor View Engine is more advanced than its earlier counterpart, providing a friendlier syntax for generating HTML code from templates. Note that Razor is a general purpose templating engine — you can use it anywhere to render HTML.