Options for imposing a deep business structure in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

My solution has a deep folder structure matching the business structure, going 3-4 levels deep, eg.:

\Franchises
   \Regionals
      \Billing
         \Monthly
         \...
         \...
      \...
      \...
   \...
   \...
\...
\...

The folder structures in the Domain, Processes and Reports projects are consistent with this structure.

MVC is a pain. By default it only allows 1 level deep:

\Controllers\BlahBlah

Using MVC Areas I can get 2 levels deep (klutzily adding two more folders to the path):

\Areas\Franchises\Controllers\BlahBlah

This is nowhere near enough to reflect the business's deep structure.

I am hesitant to vertically slice the WebUI into multiple projects as this requires further work to integrate, and seems like overkill just to impose abusiness structure.

Is there a way of imposing arbitrary folder levels into an MVC project? Should I just manually hard code all the controller routings?

Answer 1

It is not necessarily to map every controller physycal folder to route, you can organize you folder structure as you want, but if you want automatically map routes to all tree substructure - you can explore subnamespaces in your Controllers folder and automatically map it to you routes without any hardcode, there is my solution:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;

namespace WebApplication2
{
    public class RouteConfig
    {
        public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
            routes.MapRoute(
                name: "Default",
                url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
                defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
            );
            routes.MapAllRoutesToFolders();
        }
    }

    public static class RouteExtensions
    {
        public static void MapAllRoutesToFolders(this RouteCollection routes)
        {
            const string commonControllerUrl = "{controller}/{action}/{id}";
            var folderMappings = GetSubClasses<Controller>()
                .Select(x => new
                {
                    Path = string.Join("/", x.FullName
                        .Split(".".ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
                        .SkipWhile(c => c != "Controllers"))
                        .TrimStart("/Controllers/".ToCharArray())
                        .Replace(x.Name, string.Empty),
                    Name = x.Name.Replace("Controller", string.Empty)
                });
            var controllerPaths =
                folderMappings.Where(s => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(s.Path))
                    .Select(x => new
                    {
                        ControllerName = x.Name,
                        Path = x.Path + commonControllerUrl
                    });
            foreach (var controllerPath in controllerPaths)
            {
                routes.MapRoute(null, controllerPath.Path, new { controller = controllerPath.ControllerName, action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
            }
        }

        private static IEnumerable<Type> GetSubClasses<T>()
        {
            return Assembly.GetCallingAssembly().GetTypes().Where(
                type => type.IsSubclassOf(typeof(T))).ToList();
        }
    }
}

In that case, you folders structure should be like this:

After that you can check it in your browser: