Technical Jargon

I’ve just finished upgrading MvcContrib to work with ASP.NET MVC Preview 3.

The source can be downloaded from http://mvccontrib.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ using your favourite Subversion client.

Edit: Some documentation for the Grid is now available at the MvcContrib Wiki.

I’ve recently been working on an equivalent of the ASP.NET GridView for use with ASP.NET MVC.

This is partially inspired by the SmartGrid component which is part of the Castle Contrib project, but uses lambdas in order to build up a set of columns that can be automatically turned into an HTML table. For example, I might have this in an ASP.NET MVC Controller:

public class HomeController {
	private UserRepository repository = new UserRepository();

	public ActionResult Index() {
		ViewData["users"] = repository.FindAll();
		return RenderView();
	}
}

Then in my View I could have this:

<%
Html.Grid<Person>(
	"people",
	column => {
		column.For(p => p.Id);
		column.For(p => p.Name);
		column.For(p => p.Gender);
		column.For(p => p.RoleId);
	}
);
%>

Which would create something like this:

Note how the column names are automatically generated from the lambda expressions. However, you can override a column heading:

column.For(p => p.Id, "ID Number");

You can also create custom columns using lambda statements…

column.For("Custom Column").Do(p => { %>
	<td>A custom column...</td>
<% });

…and columns can have formatting applied to them:

column.For(p => p.DateOfBirth).Formatted("{0:d}");

Pagination is also fully supported by using the AsPagination extension method which works on any IEnumerable<T> or IQueryable<T>

public ActionResult Index(int? page) {
	ViewData["users"] = repository.FindAll().AsPagination(page ?? 1);
	return RenderView();
}

Which would produce something like this:

The source code is available in the mvccontrib trunk.

I recently upgraded one of my larger intranet applications to the latest ASP.NET MVC release and after doing so, I noticed that the memory usage on our webserver would gradually go up and up. After 4-5 hours all the memory on the server was in use (2gb) and the only solution was to restart the application.

After doing some investigation I realised what the problem was: System.Web.Mvc.Controller implements IDisposable and the Windsor IoC container will keep a reference to all transient objects that it creates if they implement IDisposable. So not only was every controller being kept alive, but also everything stored in the ViewData dictionary.

Explicitly calling container.Release() inside the controller factory’s DisposeController method fixed the problem.