Rust HTML (rshtml)

Project Summary

This project is focused on imitating Razor / Blazor and the MVC system for C # / .NET. There are a lot of similarly or equally named classes, enums, and methods, but 99% of the code was written without referencing the dotnet core source code.

Supported Features

• API-only and full web applications
• Dependency injection / type constructor dependency resolution
• Service collections and scoping
• HTTP request / response middleware
• Controllers, actions, action results
• HTML view templating system
• Authorization
• Authentication
• Automatic route pattern capturing and building
• Areas
• Logging / error handling
• Model binding / validation
• Property, method, attribute reflection

To Do / In Progress Features

• Constraints
• HTTPS
• Automatic area / controller / action discovery

Main Differences from C# / dot net

• Razor templating text nodes cannot capture spacing at the moment. Non-captured spaces are automatically stripped. To fix this, use @"" or @format!().
• Rust HTML (.rshtml) files are not known by the cargo build system. Changes won't automatically trigger rebuilds.

Rust HTML Templates

The HTML rendering / templating system is similar to Razor / Blazor in C#. There are enough similarities and differences that they should be mentioned here.

Similarities

• Use the '@' symbol to escape HTML and use a directive or rust code.
• keywords / directives like '@model', '@functions', '@use', '@inject' are used to extend the templating language.
• Extendable through dependency injection at many different layers.
• Can define a layout view for views that require an outer template that calls render_body().
• Can render partial views in a template or on own from action in controller, or by using view renderer.
• View paths are search by closest first, with the Shared folder being last.
• Default list of imports required to support the view template.
• Automatically prepend _view_start.rshtml to views in folder unless "" is specified

Differences

• The entry point for Rust HTML is in a macro within a rust file, so the rust parser has precedent in certain cases for tokenization and validation.
• Currently no support for hot reloading or runtime compilation of views.
• Some variable names and method names are lower case (instead of LikeThis, it is like_this).
• Can directly import HTML or Rust HTML files with @htmlfile and @rshtmlfile, and import markdown / convert to HTML with @mdfile_const or @mdfile_nocache.

Not Yet Implemented

• @attributes
• @implements
• @section
• @typeparam
• @addTagHelper
• @removeTagHelper
• @tagHelperPrefix
• Tag helpers in general
• Display and editor templates
• Sessions or state management
• Explicit HTML mode by using @:
• Automatic controller / action route discovery (might be able to use https://stackoverflow.com/a/74573771/11765486)
• General configuration
• Localization
• Background tasks / hosted services
• Entity framework?