I did some toying with Unity and ASP.NET MVC Extensions and found the documentation and number examples somewhat sparse, particularly with MVCExtension. Here’s what I did to change my project over to use MVCExtensions with Unity.
Starting with a basic ASP.NET MVC2 application:
- Download and build MVCExtensions from the latest Trunk (http://mvcextensions.codeplex.com/). This is important as the MVCExtension project is under active development. If you download the last stable release you won’t get support for ModelMetadata.
- Add references to Microsoft.Practices.Unity, MvcExtensions and MvcExtensions.Unity.
- Changed the global.asax to inherit from UnityMvcApplication
- Cleaned out the global.asax and moved route configuration to a class inherited from RegisterRouteBase.
Stop there, compile and run. All should be fine. Now you can start taking advantage of Unity, here’s a silly example. Imagine a Person class that takes an Address as a dependency.
public Person(IAddress address)
{
// do something
}
<div>
Create a class implementing IModule and register your concrete class here.
public class UnityTypeRegistration : IModule
{
public void Load(IUnityContainer container)
{
container.RegisterType<IAddress, Address>();
}
}
Even more interesting you can take advantage of the ModelMetadataConfiguration which moves your configuration from Attributes on the model (untestable) to Fluent syntax in a class:
public class PersonDisplayModelConfiguration : ModelMetadataConfiguration<PersonDisplayModel> {
public PersonDisplayModelConfiguration() {
Configure(model => model.Lastname).DisplayName(() => MyResources.Lastname)
.Required(() => "Last name is required!!");
}
}
Really hope this MVCExtension project gains some traction as there are some nice ideas therein.