ASP.NET (MVC) 5 CORE: Web Development, jQuery & RESTful API

We will talk about the other two components (View and Controller) in next lessons, but for the time being, we will learn about Model. Model is the most crucial part of any MVC application. Your complete business logic resides in Model. Model communicates with both Views and Controllers and also takes instructions from Controller. 

Now we will take a look at the second component of MVC - View.  As the name suggests, View is all about User Interface. All the forms, reports, graphs with which user interacts are called Views. Views contain a rich collection of controls like text boxes, buttons, menus etc. 

Let's talk about the last component now - Controller. This is where main work is done. The controller manages user interaction with Model and then renders the information back to UI with the help of View Objects.

As discussed in previous lessons, MVC consists of 3 basic components – Model, View, and Controller. We have already seen the details of each component in previous lessons. Before understanding the architecture of MVC application, let’s revise the concept of the components of MVC.

If you have ever worked with SQL, you may have listened to the term CRUD. CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete. If you want to use the database in your MVC application, then it is necessary to understand how CRUD works. 

To access data using ADO.Net is a hefty task. Therefore to automate the database activities, Microsoft introduced a framework known as Entity framework. Entity Framework is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) model which allows you to work with RDBMS as domain-specific objects.

In the previous lesson we saw how we can use Entity Framework with MVC, now we will see how we can use jQuery plugins in an MVC application. jQuery plugins are used to implement the functionality of jQuery objects. Whenever you will call the method jQuery() in your application, you can inherit all the methods of the jQuery class. 

To facilitate developers, MVC has the capability to integrate frameworks like JavaScript. In this lesson, we will learn about jQuery and how it can be used in an MVC application. jQuery is a JavaScript library which allows you to do more with less coding. 

Till now we have seen how to use JavaScript, jQuery and jQuery plugins in an MVC application. Now it is time to set our focus on AutoMapper. AutoMapper is a simple and tiny library used to solve complex problems and allows you to copy data from one object to another. 

A website contains numerous input fields and when a user interacts with the website, he/she can enter any sort of data in those fields. But our database has some specific data types for those fields and the user must enter data according to those data types. 

Web Service is a piece of code that makes itself available in web applications. Web Services use XML as an interpreting language. XML is responsible for encoding all the communication with a web service. For example, a user sends a request to a web service using XML and then in response, Web service communicates back using XML. 

Every MVC application involves series of steps to execute the client request. Just like other frameworks and web technologies, MVC also has a life cycle. Till now we have seen the detailed implementation of every component of MVC and the integration of technologies like AutoMapper, jQuery, JavaScript etc. Now to understand how a user request is processed from start to the end, let’s take a look at the life cycle of MVC. 

In any web application, you must have complete security over the data. For this, you need to implement two main security features – Authentication and Authorization. Authentication means only those users are allowed to sign in to a website which has authenticated username and password. While Authorization is a security mechanism with which you can check the credentials of users. 

Before learning integration of Role-based security to an MVC application, it is important to understand the basic concept of it. Role-based security allows programmers to create such systems which can limit the access of users depending on their status. In other words, you can say that Role-based security helps you in implementing authentication and authorization. In most cases, Role-based security also called role-based access control. 

In an MVC application, there are some security measures which you should consider. To make your application more secure, make sure the implementation of these features:

Deploying is the last stage in the field of web development. As soon as the developer has finished developing a web application, then comes the stage of deploying. Deploying a web application means to install the web application on the deployment server like Tom Cat etc. 

Testing is one of the most important parts of any development routine. Once, the developer has finished developing the app, it is then tested before the user uses it. There are two types of testing in a web application - Unit Testing and Integration testing. We will discuss the first in today. 

Till now we have learned the basics of an MVC application, integration of different frameworks and libraries, and testing of MVC applications. As a concluding lesson, we will now understand how to configure exception handling in MVC applications.