Limiting Access to “Functional Modules” in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I am building a site in ASP.NET 4 and MVC2 that will have premium features, such as SMS notifications that will only be available to paid subscribers. I also have additional modules for things like Inventory, and Transactions etc

I am already leveraging the standard MembershipProvider, and am leaning towards using Roles tp provide this functionality. ie: have an "SMSModule" role that the user gets if they pay for the add-on SMS service

This makes the controllers simple with a little attribute decoration, but the problem I see with this is that there will be a bunch of conditional code scattered through my views etc

Is there a better method of providing a "module" style approach in .NET 4 and MVC2???

Answer 1

FWIW I ended up using a combination of Descriptors in Spark View Engine, along with a custom Feature provider and associated ActionFilter

Answer 2

You can add your conditional logic to view models, use the controllers to set the viewmodels appropriately and it should be fine... Sometimes you have to have the if statements inside the views even if not so ellegent. Unless of course you are using a view engine like spark then your if statements are placed in another unobtrusive location, but they still exist! You can always create HtmlHelpers and set the code to the serverside and based on the logic display appropriately...