Rendering Partial View to a String

Well done that man!

Every now and then I'm thinking to myself "wouldn't it be nice if you could do x..." And then I discover that someone else has thought the self same thoughts and better yet they have the answer! I had this situation recently and discovered the wonderful Kevin Craft had been there, done that and made the T-shirt. Here's his blog:

http://craftycodeblog.com/2010/05/15/asp-net-mvc-render-partial-view-to-string/

I wanted to talk about how this simple post provided me with an elegant solution to something I've found niggling and unsatisfactory for a while now...

How it helped

Just last week I was thinking about Partial Views. Some background. I'm working on an ASP.NET MVC 3 project which provides users with a nice web interface to manage the workflow surrounding certain types of financial asset. The user is presented with a web page which shows a kind of grid to the user. As the user hovers over a row they are presented with a context menu which allows them to perform certain workflow actions. If they perform an action then that row will need to be updated to reflect this.

Back in the day this would have been achieved by doing a full postback to the server. At the server the action would be taken, the persistent storage updated and then the whole page would be served up to the user again with the relevant row of HTML updated but everything else staying as is.

Now there's nothing wrong with this approach as such. I mean it works just fine. But in my case since I knew that it was only that single row of HTML that was going to be updated and so I was loath to re-render the whole page. It seemed a waste to get so much data back from the server when only a marginal amount was due to change. And also I didn't want the user to experience the screen refresh flash. Looks ugly.

Now in the past when I've had a solution to this problem which from a UI perspective is good but from a development perspective slightly unsatisfactory. I would have my page call a controller method (via jQuery.ajax) to perform the action. This controller would return a JsonResult indicating success or failure and any data necessary to update the screen. Then in the success function I would manually update the HTML on the screen using the data provided.

Now this solution works but there's a problem. Can you tell what it is yet? It's not very DRY. I'm repeating myself. When the page is initially rendered I have a View which renders (in this example) all the relevant HTML for the screen *including* the HTML for my rows of data. And likewise I have my JavaScript method for updating the screen too. So with this solution I have duplicated my GUI logic. If I update 1, I need to update the other. It's not a massive hardship but it is, as I say, unsatisfactory.

I was recently thinking that it would be nice if I could refactor my row HTML into a Partial View which I could then use in 2 places:

1. In my standard View as I iterated through each element for display
   
   and
   
   
2. Nested inside a JsonResult...

The wonderful thing about approach 2 is that it allows me to massively simplify my success to this:

$("myRowSelector")
    .empty()
    .html(data.RowHTML); //Where RowHTML is the property that 
                         //contains my stringified PartialView

and if I later make changes to the Partial View these changes will not require me to make any changes to my JavaScript at all. Brilliant! And entirely satisfactory.

On the grounds that someone else might have had the same idea I did a little googling around. Sure enough I discovered Kevin Craft's post which was just the ticket. It does exactly what I'd hoped.

Besides being a nice and DRY solution this approach has a number of other advantages as well:

• Given it's a Partial View the Visual Studio IDE provides a nice experience when coding it up with regards to intellisense / highlighting etc. Not something available when you're hand coding up a string which contains the HTML you'd like passed back...
• A wonderful debug experience. You can debug the rendering of a Partial View being rendered to a string in the same way as if the ASP.NET MVC framework was serving it up. I could have lived without this but it's fantastic to have it available.
• It's possible to nest *multiple* Partial Views within your JsonResult. THIS IS WONDERFUL!!! This means that if several parts of your screen need to be updated (perhaps the row and a status panel as well) then as long as both are refactored into a Partial View you can generate them on the fly and pass them back.

Excellent stuff!

Optimally Serving Up JavaScript

I have occasionally done some server-side JavaScript with Rhino and Node.js but this is the exception rather than the rule. Like most folk at the moment, almost all the JavaScript I write is in a web context.

Over time I've come to adopt a roughly standard approach to how I structure my JavaScript; both the JavaScript itself and how it is placed / rendered in the an HTML document. I wanted to write about the approach I'm using. Partly just to document the approach but also because I often find writing about something crystalises my feelings on the subject in one way or another. I think that most of what I'm doing is sensible and rational but maybe as I write about this I'll come to some firmer conclusions about my direction of travel.

What are you up to?

Before I get started it's probably worth mentioning the sort of web development I'm generally called to do (as this has obviously influenced my decisions).

Most of my work tends to be on web applications used internally within a company. That is to say, web applications accessible on a Company intranet. Consequently, the user base for my applications tends to be smaller than the Amazons and Googles of this world. It almost invariably sits on the ASP.NET stack in some way. Either classic WebForms or MVC.

"Render first. JS second."

I took 2 things away from Steve Souder's article:

1. Async script loading is better than synchronous script loading
2. Get your screen rendered and *then* execute your JavaScript

I'm not doing any async script loading as yet; although I am thinking of giving it a try at some point. In terms of choosing a loader I'll probably give RequireJS first crack of the whip (purely as it looks like most people are tending it's direction and that can't be without reason).

However - it seems that the concept of async script loading is kind of conflict with one of the other tenets of web wisdom: script bundling. Script bundling, if you're not already aware, is the idea that you should combine all your scripts into a single file and then just serve that. This prevents multiple HTTP requests as each script loads in. Async script loading is obviously okay with multiple HTTP requests, presumably because of the asynchronous non-blocking pattern of loading. So. 2 different ideas. And there's further movement on this front right now as Microsoft are baking in script bundling to .NET 4.5.

Rather than divide myself between these 2 horses I have at the moment tried to follow the "JS second" part of this advice in my own (perhaps slightly old fashioned) way...

I want to serve you...

I have been making sure that scripts are the last thing served to the screen by using a customised version of Michael J. Ryan's HtmlHelper. This lovely helper allows you to add script references as required from a number of different sources (layout page, view, partial view etc - even the controller if you so desired). It's simple to control the ordering of scripts by allowing you to set a priority for each script which determines the render order.

Then as a final step before rendering the </body> tag the scripts can be rendered in one block. By this point the web page is rendered visually and a marginal amount of blocking is, in my view, acceptable.

If anyone is curious - the class below is my own version of Michael's helper. My contribution is the go faster stripes relating to the caching suffix and the ability to specify dependancies using script references rather than using numeric priority mechanism):

Minification - I want to serve you less...

Another tweak I made to the script helper meant that when compiling either the debug or production (minified) versions of common JS files will be included if available. This means in a production environment the users get minified JS files so faster loading. And in a development environment we get the full JS files which make debugging more straightforward.

What I haven't started doing is minifying my own JS files as yet. I know I'm being somewhat inconsistent here by sometimes serving minified files and sometimes not. I'm not proud. Part of my rationale for this that since most of my users use my apps on a daily basis they will for the most part be using cached JS files. Obviously there'll be slightly slower load times the first time they go to a page but nothing that significant I hope.

I have thought of starting to do my own minification as a build step but have held off for now. Again this is something being baked into .NET 4.5; another reason why I have held off doing this a different way for now.

Update

It now looks like this Microsofts optimisations have become this Nuget package. It's early days (well it was released on 15th August 2012 and I'm writing this on the 16th) but I think this looks not to be tied to MVC 4 or .NET 4.5 in which case I could use it in my current MVC 3 projects. I hope so...

By the way there's a nice rundown of how to use this by K. Scott Allen of Pluralsight. It's fantastic. Recommended.

Update 2

Having done a little asking around I now understand that this *can* be used with MVC 3 / .NET 4.0. Excellent!

One rather nice alternative script serving mechanism I've seen (but not yet used) is Andrew Davey's Cassette which I mean to take for a test drive soon. This looks fantastic (and is available as a Nuget package - 10 points!).

CDNs (they want to serve you)

I've never professionally made use of CDNs at all. There are clearly good reasons why you should but most of those good reasons relate most to public facing web apps.

As I've said, the applications I tend to work on sit behind firewalls and it's not always guaranteed what my users can see from the grand old world of web beyond. (Indeed what they see can change on hour by hour basis sometimes...) Combined with that, because my apps are only accessible by a select few I don't face the pressure to reduce load on the server that public web apps can face.

So while CDN's are clearly a good thing. I don't use them at present. And that's unlikely to change in the short term.

TL:DR

1. I don't use CDNs - they're clearly useful but they don't suit my particular needs
2. I serve each JavaScript file individually just before the body tag. I don't bundle.
3. I don't minify my own scripts (though clearly it wouldn't be hard) but I do serve the minified versions of 3rd party libraries (eg jQuery) in a Production environment.
4. I don't use async script loaders at present. I may in future; we shall see.

I expect some of the above may change (well, possibly not point #1) but this general approach is working well for me at present.

I haven't touched at all on how I'm structuring my JavaScript code itself. Perhaps next time.