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What resources besides the available source code provide a Razor ViewEngine grammar or similar descriptive document?

Specifically, I want to study how the fundamentals of the view engine are derived and tokenized/parsed before it is compiled, and I feel like there is some formal definition that defines how to do that. I have the above source code but would like any available definitive documentation that helps to describe it.

jcolebrand
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  • I'm not sure if "grammar" is the right term to use for this... I'd consider it more "design documentation" or "functional specifications" or something like that. The use of the term "grammar" is slightly misleading; however, there's no direct substitute for it that comes to mind for me. – Shotgun Ninja Jan 17 '13 at 19:17
  • Why not? The document is parsed, is it not? Parseable documents have a grammar. Or is there a different definition for this that I want? – jcolebrand Jan 17 '13 at 19:22
  • possible duplicate of [asp.net mvc3 razor documentation?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3389097/asp-net-mvc3-razor-documentation) – Travis J Jan 17 '13 at 19:28
  • There is no online documentation, only links to how-to's, and tutorials. It should be noted though, that the code inserted inside of razor blocks (aside from the helper) is mostly referencing `.net` libraries (of which, there is a lot of documentation). If you are curious about the process asp.net takes to render a page, perhaps should look into the .net pipeline: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc188942.aspx and http://www.iis.net/learn/application-frameworks/building-and-running-aspnet-applications/aspnet-integration-with-iis – Travis J Jan 17 '13 at 19:30
  • @TravisJ thanks for that, but like I pointed out, I've got the _actual source code_ from the MVC repo. What I want to do is go about constructing a parser in another language. I realize that some things don't translate directly, and that the code for the view is actually compiled then emitted, but that doesn't stop me from being able to use the same basic grammar to produce something altogether similar. – jcolebrand Jan 17 '13 at 19:36
  • @jcolebrand - You mean like a different view engine? – Travis J Jan 17 '13 at 19:37
  • I mean like, in javascript specifically. The existing ones fall far short. – jcolebrand Jan 17 '13 at 19:39
  • @jcolebrand re how they are tokenized / parsed: the MVC razor source is available. In fact, internally at SE we've written some customized plugins for that, for i18n purposes (i.e. we can add things that *look* like methods, but which actually fundamentally generate the compilation pipeline, rather than actually calling methods) – Marc Gravell Jan 17 '13 at 19:48
  • @MarcGravell but not that you know of a formal grammar huh, just the avialable tokenizers/parsers? I have downloaded the repo today and am going to go diving into it, but thought that it would be a responsible experience to go ahead and ask if such a thing exists before getting lost, ya know? – jcolebrand Jan 17 '13 at 19:49
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    @jcolebrand indeed, I am not aware of a formal grammar – Marc Gravell Jan 17 '13 at 19:55

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