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I don't even know if this is even possible, but I thought I'd ask.

I am creating a small CRUD application but I have multiple sites. Each site would use the CRUD. The application would have common CRUD methods and style, but each individual site would apply different forms. I want to avoid creating multiple CRUD applications that varied only in specific content (just different forms).

I want to have something like this:

mycrud.website1.com
mycrud.website2.com
mycrud.website3.com

I can create a subdomain for each individual site no problem. But is it feasible to point all the subdomains to one MVC application directory? And if it is possible any suggestions for how I might go about restricting users from website1 from seeing website2 or website3 content? Is that something "roles" could take care of (after authenticating user)?

Thanks.

REMESQ
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2 Answers2

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There are a lot of websites that do this, not just with MVC. Some content farms point *.mydomain.com to a single IP and have a wild card mapping in IIS.

From there, your application should look at the URL to determine what it should be doing. Some CMS systems operate in this manner, using the domain as a key to deciding what pages to load.

I've built a private labelable SAS application (Software as a Service) that allows us to host all of our clients in a single application. Some clients have customizations to pages or features. We are able to handle that by creating custom plugins for each client that over-ride the Controllers or Views when needed.

All clients share a common code base and aside from each clients custom theme/template they are the same. Only when a client had us customize one feature did we need to build out their plugin DLL. Now, this is advanced stuff so it would require heavy modifications to your code base but in the end if it's what your application needs it is 100% possible.

Nick Bork
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First - the easy part is having one web site for all three domains. You can do that simply with DNS entries. No problem. All three domains should point at the same ip.

As far as the content, you could do that in a number of ways. I think your idea of roles is pretty solid. It also leaves open the possible of a given user seeing content from both site1 and site2, if that would ever be necessary.

If you don't want to force users to authenticate, you should look at other options. You could wrap your CRUD logic and data access logic into separate libraries and use them across three different sites in IIS. You could have one site and display content based on the request URL. There's probably a lot of other options too.

Trent
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  • Thanks for the tips. I'm digging your last paragraph, as it hits on something I was mulling over: there is some lite-CRUD I want to do, but was thinking I'd have no choice but to put it in the main CRUD and require authentication. Do you have any suggestions/links on how to accomplish not forcing users to authenticate/displaying content based on request URL? – REMESQ Mar 30 '12 at 13:27
  • The URL will be available in the controller under the Request object. That's part of the MVC framework. I would suggest setting up a base controller to sniff the URL and set a property called CurrentSite (or something like that). Then, you can change your controllers to inherit from your base controller. (your base controller should inherit from Controller). Then, you controller will have access to the properties and can display content based on those. – Trent Mar 30 '12 at 13:54
  • this post includes an example of setting up a base controller (although he is doing it for internationalization). http://afana.me/post/aspnet-mvc-internationalization.aspx – Trent Mar 30 '12 at 13:57
  • Great! Thanks a bunch for the guidance and link. – REMESQ Mar 30 '12 at 14:01