Razor view engine for TinyWeb

If you haven’t heard of Tinyweb I suggest you check out out at Martin Rue’s series of blog posts. (Tinyweb series)

When I first tried Tinyweb I thought it was a great example of the Single Responsibility Principle. I found it was missing the razor view engine and I wanted to try and port https://razor-engine.com/ to this project.

This wasn’t easy. The RazorEngine that Matt and I (mostly Matt) developed initially was too…large…for this particular port and didn’t have all the features I wanted to bring to this project. Layout pages, for instance. I tried to add layout pages to RazorEngine but had way too much trouble. I decided that I needed to rewrite the engine from scratch and focus entirely on writing one for this particular project.

TemplateBase<T>

The first thing I needed was a new template base. The new features I’ve added is a Func<string> RenderBody method so that Layout pages can render the children, a really basic HtmlHelper to make a few of the base calls and provide a platform for adding new extension methods based on HtmlHelper, and last an instance based StringBuilder to create the View. (The RazorEngine used a ThreadStatic builder)

public abstract class TemplateBase<T> {
    //Methods that were not included are inherent to Razor such as Write, WriteLiteral and Execute
    public string Layout { get; set; }

    public Func<string> RenderBody { get; set; }
    public HtmlHelper<T> Html { get; set; }
    public string Path { get; internal set; }
    public StringBuilder Builder { get; private set; }
    public string Result { get { return Builder.ToString(); } }
    public T Model { get; set; }

    protected TemplateBase() {
        Builder = new StringBuilder();
        Html = new HtmlHelper<T>(this);
    }

}

RazorCompiler

This razor compiler is tiny - and it only supports c#. (I’ll be adding VB eventually) There are two static overloaded Render methods that accept a model, templatename and masterpath and they both return the view as a string. Templates are compiled like normal and cached for future requests. The new feature here is Layout templates. If view has a Layout define or a master page name was passed in we execute the MasterView and pass in the current instance view.

//used to render the master
private static string RenderMasterView<T>(T model, string templatePath, TemplateBase<T> instance) {
    var masterPath = Helpers.ResolveTemplatePath(instance.Layout, new string[] { System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(templatePath) });

    var masterInstance = GetCompiledTemplate<object>(model, masterPath);
    //RenderBody is a func that we can overwrite
    //makes it nice and easy.
    masterInstance.RenderBody = () => {
        return instance.Result;
    };

    masterInstance.Execute();

    return masterInstance.Result;
}

RazorResult

The RazorResult class just returns an IResult (expected by TinyWeb) which contains a single method ProcessResult.

public virtual void ProcessResult(IRequestContext request, IResponseContext response) {
    response.ContentType = "text/html";
    response.Write(RazorCompiler.Render(_templateName, _master));
}

To call the RazorResult class we have a View class which contains contains a couple static methods that return RazorResult. And in your handler you just call:

public class HelloWorldHandler {
    public IResult Get() {
        HelloWorldModel model = new HelloWorldModel() { Name = "Ben" };
        return View.Razor<HelloWorldModel>(model, "HelloWorld");
    }
}

It’s really that simple.

The full source code is available on Github. Please do what you will with it.

*Special thanks goes out to Sam Saffron for helping me whittle down the compiler to what it currently is.

-Ben Dornis