Routing for Single Page Application in ASP.NET Core

Question

I have a Single Page Application written in JavaScript, and I use HTML5 history API to handle URLs on the client side. This means any URLs sent to the server should cause the server to render the same page.

In the ASP.NET MVC 5 I wrote this code to do this:

public class RouteConfig
{
    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        // ...
        routes.Add(new Route("{*path}", new MyRouteHandler()));
    }
}

public class MyRouteHandler : IRouteHandler
{
    public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        return WebPageHttpHandler.CreateFromVirtualPath("~/index.cshtml");
    }
}

This worked really well. No matter what URL the server gets, it renders index.cshtml. Note that I am able to use a .cshtml file (as opposed to an .html file) which means I can have some C# code to dynamically change what .js scripts are included, append version numbers to .css files, and so on. What's more, I didn't have to implement controllers and views and so on just to render this .cshtml file.

Now we come to the question: How do you do this in ASP.NET Core? I have been reading the documentation, but I don't see how to render a .cshtml file without adding controller classes, view folders and other rigmarole.

Anyone know the equivalent code in ASP.NET Core?

Eilon Eilon · Accepted Answer · 2017-01-01T20:50:48

Currently to run a CSHTML page "the normal way" in ASP.NET Core requires using ASP.NET Core MVC.

However, there is a planned feature that is being worked on that is somewhat similar to ASP.NET (non-Core) Web Pages, where you can have standalone CSHTML files. That feature is being tracked here: https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/issues/494 (and as far as naming for the new feature, that is being tracked here: https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/issues/5208).

There's also a sample of how to render an MVC view to a string (e.g. to generate an email, report, etc.), and that sample is available here: https://github.com/aspnet/Entropy/tree/dev/samples/Mvc.RenderViewToString But to use this sample in the scenario you describe, you'd have to do some extra plumbing to wire it up as its own middleware (not a lot of plumbing; just a little!).

It's also worth noting that in your scenario you probably don't want all URLs going to this one view, because you still need the static files middleware running first to handle the CSS, JS, images, and other static content. Presumably you just want all other URLs to go to this dynamic view.

Routing for Single Page Application in ASP.NET Core

1 Answers