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ASP.NET Core Utility

This solution add some useful features for ASP.NET Core projects. All projects in this solution are designed for cross-platform "netstandard" and triditional .NET Full "net" frameworks.

This solution contains the following aspects:

Current Project List

This section lists all projects in the repo. The list will always update in time.

External Cookie Services

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.Authentication.ExternalCookie

ASP.NET Core Identity Service (Microsoft.AspNet.Identity package) already added support for external cookie services, which is required for 3rd application authentication scheme (e.g. Microsoft of Fackbook account). You may use AddIdentity and UseIdentity method to enable external cookie services. However, in sometimes you may wish to enable external services indivindually without full ASP.NET Identity Service enabled. This project seperates the external cookie services from ASP.NET Identity Services, and may be used in more complex authentication scenes.

The major feature of this project contains:

ASP.NET Core MVC TagHelper Extension Library

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.Mvc.TagHelpers

Provide new tag helpers in order to simplify MVC code writing. For more details, please visit the Tag Helper Demo page.

ASP.NET TempData Extension Package

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.Mvc.TempDataExtensions

This project provides the EnhancedSessionStateTempDataProvider service provider, with can replace the original SessionBasedTempDataProvider, in order to enhance the type compatibility for session data. The original TempData provider can only work with primitive types, arrays, and one-level plain-objects, objects with complex properties are not supported. The EnhancedSessionStateTempDataProvider can successfully work with most data objects with arbitray level structures.

Internally, it uses certain serializer techinque to convert complex data into string value, and store it together with its type full name. When application loading its content, it will deserialize the string to recover the object data structure. The default implmementation uses JsonObjectSerializer, and you may also replace it with your own implementation if necessary.

ASP.NET Core MVC Messages Package

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.Mvc.Messages

This project add the feature of common operation message response in web applications, as well as tag helpers to simplify message presentations. The detailed features includes:

*NOTE: To use this package, your ITempDataProvider implementation must have the ability to store and load ICollection<OperationMessage> instance. Defaultly, the ASP.NET5 SessionStateTempDataProvider cannot support data operation of complex objects. You may change into another ITempDataProvider implementation, or just use EnhancedSessionStateTempDataProvider in the ASP.NET TempData Extension Package project.

ASP.NET Core PagedList Packages

Nuget Package Name:

The Sakura.AspNetCore.PagedList package provides the IPagedList core interface to represent as a data page for a large data source. Some extension methods are also provided to generate instance from any IEnumerable<T> or IQueryable<T> data sources.

The Sakura.AspNetCore.PagedList.Async package helpes you to generate IPagedList using async extension method (ToArrayAsync, etc.) defined in Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore package.

The Sakura.AspNetCore.Mvc.PagedList allows you to use <pager> tag in your MVC view page to generate a full featured pager structure.

For detailed usage, please visit the Demo page. Notice: this package has been updated to version 2 (the recommended version)． For usage of version 1, please visit the Version 1 Demo page.

ASP.NET ActionResult Extensions Package

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.Mvc.ActionResultExceptionExtensions

In MVC Projects, you need to return a instance of IActionResult to finish the action pipeline, this design made it difficult to add common helper functions to make argument or permission checking and then report a specified status code directly to end user. This library allows you to terminate action executing pipeline directly with a specified result through the standard exception handling system.

In order to enable this feature, all you need is adding an EnableActionResultException attribute on a controller or action, and then you can throw an ActionResultExceptioninstance to terminate a action executing pipeline directly and provide the final action result. If you need to enable this feature globally, you can use EnableActionResultExceptionFilter extension method on MvcOptions parameter when you add the MVC middleware.

ASP.NET Core MVC Dyanmic Localizer Package

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.AspNetCore.DynamicLocalizer

ASP.NET Core 1.0 introduced a new localization design model, which allow developers to access localized resources using IStringLocalizer, IHtmlLocalizer or IViewLocalizer service instances. In order to keep compatibilty and reduce the time cost for switching the developing time single language website into production multiple language implementation, ASP.NET Core team suggests developers to use string context itself as the language resource keys. e.g. the following code

@ViewLocalizer["Hello World"]

while output the key string "hello world" when there's no resource files defined or the resource for current culture is unavialable.

Although this design reduces the time cost of enabling multiple language support, lots of developers may still build the website with multiple language support from the beginning. The above manner may not be optimized for these scenes, since under such circumstance, developers may choose to use identifier-like word as keys for long messages, e.g. the final code in the CSHTML file maybe:

@ViewLocalizer["HelloWorldMessage"]

However, actually developers may love the following code style much more:

@ViewLocalizer.HelloWorldMessage

The above code style looks with much more object-oriented code style, and may also take a lot of editing and compiling time benefits such as identifier checking, searching and intellisence. This behaviour is also favorite for old-time .NET Resource Manager based localizaable applications, in which each resources is named with an identifier and the resource file generators will help you to generate classes for resources, and developers may use strong named propreties to access resources.

The Sakura.AspNetCore.DynamicLocalizer package now provides a simplified simulation for object-oreinted resource accessing style using .NET dynamic objects. For a simple usage, you may install this package and add the necessary services on startup using the following code:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
  // other service configurations here
  
  // Note: the following base services are necessary and must be also added manually in your startup code
  services.AddLocalization();
  services.AddMvc().AddViewLocalization();
  
  // add core services used for dynamic localizer
  services.AddDynamicLocalizer();
}

And now in MVC views, you may using dyanmic object as localization services, the basic usage is shown in the following code:

@inject Sakura.AspNetCore.IDynamicViewLocalizer ViewLocalizer
@inject Sakura.AspNetCore.IDynamicHtmlLocalizer<MyResource> MyResourceLocalizer

<p>@ViewLocalizer.Html.WelcomeMessage</p>
<p>@ViewLocalizer.Html.UserNameFormat(ViewBag.UserName)</p>

<p>@MyResourceLocalizer.Html.ImportantTip<Hello>

More specifically, the relationship between original localizers and dynamic localizers are shown as bellow:

OriginalDynamic
IViewLocalizerIDyanmicViewLocalizer
IHtmlLocalizer<T>IDynamicHtmlLocalizer<T>
IStringLocalizer<T>IDynamicStringLocalizer<T>

The following tables showes the supported invocation syntax for dynamic localizers (words in braces are identfier placeholders):

SyntaxEquivelant Orignal SyntaxNotes
localizer.Html.{Key}localizer.GetHtml("{Key}")]This method is not available in IStringLocalizer
localizer.Html.{Key}({Value1}, {Value2})localizer.GetHtml("{Key}", Value1, Value2)]This method is not available in IStringLocalizer
localizer.Text.{Key}localizer.GetString("{Key}")Allowed in all localizers
localizer.Text.{Key}({Value1}, {Value2})localizer.GetString("{Key}", Value1, Value2)]Allowed in all localizers

Note: The behaviour default index-style syntax (e.g. localizer["Key", Value1, Value2]) depends on the type of the localizer. For IViewLocalizer and IHtmlLocalizer, it is equivelant to GetHtml, while for IStringLocalizer, it's equivelant to GetString.

For compatbility reason, the dynamic localizer also support the index style syntax, which will generate the same effect for the new syntax, e.g. localizer.Html["{Key}", Value1, Value2] are equivelant to localizer.Html.Key(Value1, Value2).

ASP.NET Entity Framework Core FromSql Extension Package

Nuget Package Name: Sakura.EntityFrameworkCore.FromSqlExtensions

In Entity Framework Core 2.1, the concept of the new QueryType is introduced, which allows developers to mapping non-table-based query results (e.g. data comes from a database view or a stored procedure) to CLR types. However, in order to use query types, you must first include it in your model. This restriction will cause you to take a lot of unnecessary work when you want to executing a raw SQL statement directly.

More specifically, let's see an example. You want to query some data using a stored procedure named "GetTopStudents" from your database, you know the procedure will produce the top 10 students with highest scores along with their name, and then you may define a query type as well as the following executing codes:

public class TopStudentInfo
{
  public string Name { get; set; }
  public int Score { get; set; }
}

// The following code is used to extract the top student infomation.
var result = MyDbContext.Query<TopStudentInfo>().FromSql("EXEC [GetTopStudents]");

However, when you try to execute the code above, Entity Framework Core will tell you that the TopStudentInfo is not included in the model. In order to fix this exception, you must first include it just like:

public class StudentDbContext : DbContext
{
  public virtual DbQuery<TopStudentInfo> TopStudents { get; set; }
}

And then you can get the result using either

MyDbContext.Query<TopStudentInfo>().FromSql("EXEC [GetTopStudents]")

or

MyDbContext.TopStudents.FromSql("EXEC [GetTopStudents]")

The reason why EF requires you to include the query type is to support a chained-query just like from i in MyDbContext.TopStudents select i. Under such circumstance, the query type must be included and mapped with either ToView or ToQuery to declare its original data source. However, if you just want to take usage of the FromSql method, the mapping step will be reduntant, but you still need to define the query type in your DbContext class.

Considering that you may executing serveral different raw SQL queries or stored procedures in your project. For each of them, you must include the query type into your model individually and this requirement will be a quite boring work. Now the Sakura.EntityFrameworkCore.FromSqlExtensions package provides extension methods for including query types and executing raw SQL statements directly, now you may using the following code:

var result = MyDbContext.FromSql<TopStudents>("EXEC [GetTopStudents]");

to get the result without explicitly defining a context-level DbQuery instance.

Note: Internally, this extension method will register the query type into the model globally when you call it if it not exists before, and thus after you call this method sereval times with different types, there will be a huge number of query types added in your model. It may seems to be a side-effect (although adding a new query type actually does not generate performance burden for EF Core), while is problem is caused by the internal design of the EF Core and currently it is not possible to implement query-level type registrations.

Contribution and Discussion

You are welcome to add issues and advices, if you want to contribute to the project, please fell free to make pull requests.