This is the third part in a series of posts where I build a forum application. The other posts can be found here:

• Building a forum application, Part 1
• Building a forum application, Part 2

 In this post I´ll show you the initial structure of the application. I have created a structure and a few base classes for the application, and I tought I´d walk you trought what I have done so far in this post.

I decided to go with 6 projects, 3 test projects and 3 application projects. First I have the web application. Here is all the "web" stuff. Then I have a "core" project. Here I will keep my entity classes, interfaces for services and repositories, the services, helper classes for my model and probably some other stuff aswell that I find logical to keep here. The last project is the "Data" project. Here I will keep my repositories and my NHibernate mappings.

In my web application I will keep my views, my controllers, view helpers and viewmodels. I have created a baseviewmodel that has a PageTitle and a list of breadcrumbs that I can use on any page. My masterpage will have a typed model that is the BaseViewModel. Then I created a BaseController. So far I override the View method and there I set the page title based on the breadcrumbs of my baseviewmodel if the title isn´t allready set. The method now looks like this:

protected override ViewResult View(string viewName, 
                        string masterName, object model)
{
    if (model is BaseViewModel)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(((BaseViewModel)model).PageTitle))
        {
            var sb = new StringBuilder();
            sb.Append(this.Configuration().ApplicationName);
            if (((BaseViewModel)model).BreadCrumbs != null)
                foreach (var crumb in ((BaseViewModel)model)
                                                 .BreadCrumbs)
                    sb.AppendFormat("{0}{1}", this.Configuration()
                                       .TitleSeperator, crumb.Name);
            ((BaseViewModel)model).PageTitle = sb.ToString();
        }
    }
    return base.View(viewName, masterName, model);
}

 The "this.Configuration()" is a extension method I created for the BaseController class that gets the default implementation for my interface "IAppConfiguration" from my structuremap repository. IAppConfiguration looks like this:

public interface IAppConfiguration
{
    string ApplicationName { get; }
    string TitleSeperator { get; }
}

This will, ofcourse, be extended as the application takes form.

The Core project so far contains the model that I presented in my last post. I have allso created a few "helper classes" for my entities. This is basicly a set of extension methods that will help me controll my model while developing the application. To view those more closely you can download the application, I will post a link at the end of this thread. I allso created a BaseService that will handle the most basic stuff that most services need to handle.

My Data project will contain my repositories and the mapping files. I have so far created a BaseRepository that, like the BaseService, handels all the basic stuff that most repositories need. I have allso mapped my entities to the database that I will use.

You can download the source for the application here. I have allso set up a svn repository, so you can download the code from time to time as the project progresses. The url to the server is: https://87.237.213.147:8443/svn/Mattias_Forum. You can log in with username: "User" and no password.