Multiple URLS on Application 1

[nevets2001uk]

I wanted some help on where to start with the following project design. I want to develop a cms type site which allows multiple customers to register and have a CMS driven website. Each site would be a single asp.net application which loads the data on something like a cutsomerid. So I plan to have

http://www.mysite.com/about.aspx

which loads the content based on the customerid either from querystring or session value. Another option I was toying with was giving each customer a subdomain so customer1.mysite.com which points to the app but it works out the content to display based on the subdomain.

I don't really know what technologies to research in .net to do this. The most complex example might be customers who wish to point their domain to my system, so it looks as though it's there own site but it's still my application as the engine underneath. How would I need to design the setup for this scenario?

Steve G (MCSE / MCSA:Messaging)

 

[jmeckley]

You are talking about software as a service and multitenancy applications. there are a number of ways to implement this.

things to think about are scalability and extendability. these will be the 2 things that will cause the most pain.
Scalability: what will it take to host 10, 100, 1000, 10K, 10M users?
Extendability: user A wants to capture additional data points while user B wants to change the work flow when "preferred" customers place an order.

One thing I can say is that you would not be managing the security/ filtering with querystrings. instead this will be done at the server level using the current context's user and whatever roles they may be a part of.

Jason Meckley
Programmer

faq855-7190
faq732-7259

 

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks Jason. Having read up on multi-tenancy that sounds like what I'm trying to do. My concern now is that the articles I have found all relate to doing it with MVC and I'm using webforms. I've never used MVC and for speed of development I'm not keen to switch.

Are there any examples of multi tenant approaches using webforms? Is there a specific reason why it's not done?

Steve G (MCSE / MCSA:Messaging)

 

[jmeckley]

I'm not the person to ask about webforms I loathe that framework. There are others here how may be able to provide more insight into multi-tenancy with webforms though.

I believe the use of MVC is a result of the requirements for an extensible design. MT systems typically consist of a core set of features and then tenants can request customization (data, procedure, etc). MVC is just one of the frameworks that aid in minimizing maintenance of the code base.

I've never used MVC and for speed of development I'm not keen to switch.

pure conjecture, but I don't think the time required to learn MVC would delay the project that much. MVC is a much simpler API than webforms. If you understand HTTP, MVC makes sense. If it takes more than a week to learn I would be surprised.

If you decide to pursue MVC I would start by learning the design concepts of MVC. From there you could pick up a specific framework: MS MVC, FUBU MVC or Castle Monorail.

Jason Meckley
Programmer

faq855-7190
faq732-7259

 

[nevets2001uk]

Thanks again Jason. I'll perhaps check MVC out again. I spent a bit of time researching MVC before starting and from all the pros and cons I could find it seemed to suggest that for a highly data driven sites webforms was quicker and more suited.

I'm using the entity framework and would like to continue to use that if MVC support it.

My site will be fairly fixed in it's offering as my target market have a fairly fixed set of needs I intend to address with little tenant specific modification being done.

Steve G (MCSE / MCSA:Messaging)