Spark View Engine on WebForms

Spark view engine is a neat little web utility that allows you to write code like this:

<viewdata products="IEnumerable[[Product]]"/>
<ul if="products.Any()">
  <li each="var p in products">${p.Name}</li>
</ul>
<else>
  <p>No products available</p>
</else>

If your eye skipped over it because it looks just like html I wouldn’t blame you. But look again. Loops and conditions are nicely embedded in html. Spark really does let the html dominate (which can be a good thing). These are but a few of all the nice features. If you have them, spend a couple of minutes browsing the spark documentation to learn what’s more.

To learn a bit about the inner workings of this wonderful tool I set out to add WebForms support. The spark codebase has a very testable design and can be coerced to help out in a WebForms control without modification. The end result look like this:

<spark:View runat="server">
  <ul if="Container.GetProducts().Any()">
    <li each="var p in Container.GetProducts()">${p.Name}</li>
  </ul>
  <else>
    <p>No products available</p>
  </else>
</spark:View>

Download and usage

To use it download

• Spark.Web.Forms.zip 

and unzip into your bin folder.

Register the control in web.config:

<pages>
  <controls>
    <add tagPrefix="spark" namespace="Spark.Web.Forms" assembly="Spark.Web.Forms"/>

Add something useful to iterate over to your page or user control:

public string[] Values;
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  Values = new string[] { "Simple", "As", "Pancake" };
}

And add the spark control:

<spark:View runat="server">
  <ul>
    <li each="var c in Page.Values">${c}</li>
  </ul>
</spark:View>

Future improvement ideas

Some features are definitely missing (and they might require modification of the spark code itself):

• Spool content from a spark view controls placed later in the control tree
• Cache the compiled views
• Support the spark cache element

The code is over here.