Asset Management

Asset Management

Existing Functionality

• Script Dependency Management DSL
  • CRUD includes jquery.forms.js, jquery.validation.js, blah (Named Script Sets)
  • DSL (*.script.config) files
  • A requires B (dependencies)
  • A1 extends A (extensions)
  • jquery is jquery.1.4.js (aliasing, helps with versioning)
  • ordered set CRUD is (ordered named sets)
• this.Script() -- add a new script dependency in the view itself to the graph (or in a script activator). Does NOT write script tags out. Can be a set name, a script name, or an alias
• ScriptRequirements -- class scoped to a request that allows code to add a new script dependency. this.Script() extension method delegates to ScriptRequirements. Html helpers or view activators or even other behaviors can use ScriptRequirements to add scripts to a view
• this.CSS() -- adds a single CSS tag to a page.
• this.WriteScriptTags() -- writes out all the script tags out, using the declarations and script dependencies to both find and order the tags on a page

Outstanding work

• CoffeeScript support server side
  • Production mode where the converted file is cached
  • Dev mode where the conversion happens on the fly. Maybe do this with client side interpretation instead?
• "Page" Script -- scripts that bypass dependencies and go to the bottom
  • this.PageScript(name)
  • Automatically match /folder/thisview.js to /folder/thisview.spark (or thisview.aspx) as a PageScript to encourage the externalization of javascript goop with less friction and hopefully get more JS unit testing going on
• Utilize IIS caching of content files for package content. This is a serious perf. concern at Dovetail. My recommendation is to copy the content files for packages under ~/content/[package name] with an IActivator for zip file packages
• SASS / LESS integration
• Allow CSS files to be dynamically declared externally to a page through view activators. We want this at Dovetail for extensibility scenarios with customer specific styles
• Bring CSS files into the ScriptGraph world so you can use dep's and sets
• Per Ryan Rauhr's suggestion, ScriptGraph becomes AssetGraph(?) -- Big advantages. Probably makes for a lot of code sharing betwixt SASS / LESS / CoffeeScript / the next thing that generates javascript or CSS on the fly
• Pluggable Script / CSS Combination strategies -- I wanna accomplish this through drop in bottles
• Minification strategies -- again, dropin bottles
• CDN support
• Cache busting
• Diagnostics Baby!!!
  • Activator that runs last and fails the app bootstrapping if a named set refers to a script that cannot be found
  • Diagnostic page that lets you interactively test which scripts would be loaded for calls to Script() or CSS()
  • Runtime tracing of script loading for the request tracing feature in adv. diagnostics
    • Which scripts were loaded, how, and from what file location
    • Requested scripts that could not be found
  • diagnostic page that lets you see what the script configuration picked up and app startup time

Crazy Ideas

• Use the VS.Net script dependency mechanism as an additional way to declare dependencies (?)
• Support require.js? Dunno what this means right now.