Spark View Engine

What is Spark

It's a view engine for Asp.Net Mvc and Castle Project MonoRail frameworks. The idea is to allow the html to dominate the flow and the code to fit seamlessly.

For example, 

<ul>
  <li each='var p in ViewData.Model.Products'>
    $p.Name; $Html.ActionLink[[ProductController]](c=>c.Edit(p.Id), "Edit");
  </li>  
</ul>

The full csharp language is available in a way that doesn't interfere with the harmony and balance of the markup. The view template files produced compiled classes.

Key Resources

Download Spark Most recent build and release notes

Documentation Note: table of contents at the right has links to multiple wiki pages.

Spark Development Google group

Where's Lou - tagged Spark

See also PerformanceBenchmarks.

Source Code

For "edge" code - both Castle Project MonoRail and Asp.Net Mvc view engine 

svn co http://dev.dejardin.org/svn/spark/trunk/ Spark
cd Spark
build

For Castle Project MonoRail view engine in contrib trunk 

svn co http://svn.castleproject.org:8080/svn/castlecontrib/viewengines/spark/trunk Spark
cd Spark
build

Assuming you're using a particular build of castle you would copy those assemblies onto over the ones which are a part of the project at bin/castle.

You can browse the source online at source:/trunk/src

Castle Dev Group - Spark view engine

Mvc dev group - Contributing a view engine

What it looks like

As a brief example of a master and a view spark xml:

application.xml 

<html>
  <head>
    <viewdata Title="string"/>
    <title>$Title;</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    $Content["view"];
  </body>
</html>

demo.xml 

<h1>$Title;</h1>
<viewdata Posts="System.Collections.Generic.IList[[SampleCode.Models.Post]]" />
<for each="var post in Posts">
  <h2>$Html.Encode(post.Title);</h2>
  <div>$post.Brief;</div>
</for>

And an action on a controller 

public ActionResult Demo()
{
    return View("Demo", "Application", new
    {
        Title = "Some Blog",
        Posts = new[] 
        { 
            new Post { Title = "Hello World", Brief = "<p>Something</p>"},
            new Post { Title = "Spark Headlines", Brief = "<p>Something else</p>"}
        }
    });
}

More complete documentation about view engine features will be at SparkDocumentation.

The following class is generated and compiled by the view engine. (note - this is out of date... The output is now a TextWriter?, but the general idea remains the same.) 

public class CompiledSparkView : MvcContrib.SparkViewEngine.SparkViewBase
{
    System.Collections.Generic.IList<SparkDemoSite.Models.Post> Posts 
    { get { return (System.Collections.Generic.IList<SparkDemoSite.Models.Post>)ViewData["Posts"]; } }

    string Title 
    { get { return (string)ViewData["Title"]; } }

    public void ProcessView()
    {
        var output = BindContent("view");
        output.Append("<h1>");
        output.Append(Title);
        output.Append("</h1>\r\n");
        output.Append("\r\n");
        foreach (var post in Posts)
        {
            output.Append("\r\n  <h2>");
            output.Append(Html.Encode(post.Title));
            output.Append("</h2>\r\n  <div>");
            output.Append(post.Brief);
            output.Append("</div>\r\n");
        } //foreach var post in Posts
        output.Append("\r\n");
    }

    public override string ProcessRequest()
    {
        ProcessView();
        var output = BindContent("master");
        output.Append("<html>\r\n  <head>\r\n    ");
        output.Append("\r\n    <title>");
        output.Append(Title);
        output.Append("</title>\r\n  </head>\r\n  <body>\r\n    ");
        output.Append(Content["view"]);
        output.Append("\r\n  </body>\r\n</html>\r\n");
        return _content["master"].ToString();
    }
}

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