ZPT Sharp Zen HTML views

ASP.NET MVC ViewEngine

The first purpose of ZPT-Sharp is to serve as an ASP.NET MVC ViewEngine.

The minimum to get started

To get started using ZPT-Sharp, all you need do is to register the view engine, and you are away!

// Typically in your Global.asax.cs:
protected void Application_Start()
{
  ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();
  ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new ZptViewEngine());
}

You may now create and use ZPT views in your application by including the files (in an acceptable format, either .pt or .xml) in the Views directory. There is no special requirement upon your controllers or your models.

Supplemental TALES variables

When writing MVC views using ZPT, a number of additional TALES root variables are available, provided by the ZPT-Sharp MVC ViewEngine. Their values are populated automatically based upon the ViewContext provided by MVC.

Name	Description	MVC equivalent
ViewData	The view-data dictionary	ViewContext.ViewData
TempData	The temp-data dictionary	ViewContext.TempData
ViewBag	The view-bag dynamic object	ViewContext.ViewBag
FormContext	The form context object	ViewContext.FormContext
Application	The application state dictionary	ViewContext.HttpContext.Application
Cache	The cache dictionary	ViewContext.HttpContext.Cache
Request	The request helper	ViewContext.HttpContext.Request
Response	The response helper	ViewContext.HttpContext.Response
RouteData	The route-data	ViewContext.RouteData
Server	The ASP.NET server helper	ViewContext.HttpContext.Server
Session	The ASP.NET session helper	ViewContext.HttpContext.Session
Model	The MVC model (you may also use `here`)	ViewContext.ViewData.Model
Views	Filesystem directory object pointing at the virtual path `~/Views/`	None