In a recent post I expressed a few thoughts on using a DSL instead of an XML config file. I followed that up with a technical look at monkey patching CLR objects using IronRuby, which explores a tiny bit of interop.

These posts were precursors to this post in which I apply these ideas to an implementation that allows me to define ASP.NET MVC Routes using IronRuby. Also included in this download is an incomplete implementation of an IronRuby view engine. I haven’t yet implemented layouts.

IronRubyMvcDemo.zip Download (4.93 MB)

This implementation works with the latest CodePlex drop of MVC.

To use routes written in Ruby, reference the IronRubyMvcLibrary from your MVC Web Application and import the IronRubyMvcLibrary.Routing namespace into your Global.asax code behind file. From there, you can just call an extension method on RouteCollection like so…

public class GlobalApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
{
  protected void Application_Start()
  {
    RouteTable.Routes.LoadFromRuby();
  }
}

This will look for a Routes.rb file within the webroot and use that file to load routes. Here’s a look at mine:

$routes.map "products/{action}/{id}"
  , {:controller => 'products', :action => 'categories', :id => ''}
$routes.map "{controller}/{action}/{id}", {:id => ''}
$routes.map "{controller}", {:action => 'index'}, {:controller => '[^\.]*'}
$routes.map "default.aspx", {:controller => 'home', :action => 'index'}

That’s it. No other cruft in there. I tried experimenting with lining up each segment using tabs so it looks like an actual table of data, rather than simply code definitions.

Also included in this download is a sample web app that makes use of the IronRubyViewEngine. You can see how I applied Monkey Patching to make referencing view data cleaner. Within an IronRuby view, you can access the view data via a global variable, $model. The nice part is, whether you pass strongly typed data or not to the view, you can always reference view data via $model.property_name.

In the case where the view data is a view data dictionary, this will perform a dictionary lookup using the property name as the key.

Be sure to check out the unit tests which provide over 95% code coverage of my code if you want to understand this code and improve on it. Next stop, Controllers in IronRuby…