Aurelia with ASP.NET Core: Host Aurelia from a Controller

This is the forth entry in a series using Aurelia and ASP.NET Core together. Each post builds on the previous and all the code is available on Github.

Part 1 – Add Aurelia to an ASP.NET Core Project
Part 2 – Aurelia with an ASP.NET Core API
Part 3 – Aurelia with an ASP.NET Core API: Modeling and Displaying Data in Aurelia
Part 4 – Aurelia with ASP.NET Core: Host Aurelia from a Controller (this post)
Github repo with the code for all of the parts with a release to go with each post

The goal

So far the Aurelia application in this series has existed outside of the the ASP.NET Core application. This post is going move the Aurelia application to be hosted by a MVC controller and a razor view. This would allow an existing application to slowly be ported to Aurelia or allow portions of an application to be replaced by Aurelia as it made sense, etc.

The controller

The controller isn’t going to be doing much other than returning a view that contains the entry point for the Aurelia application. This example will be using a new Aurelia  action on the HomeController.

public IActionResult Aurelia()
{
    return View();
}

The view

Next create a view in the Views/Home folder named Aurelia.cshtml to match the name of the action added to the HomeController above. Right click on the Home folder and select Add > New Item.

This will show the Add New Item dialog. Using the search in the upper right corner serach for MVC and select MVC View Page. Enter Aurelia.cshtml as the name and click Add.

Enter the following in the newly created file.

<div aurelia-app="main">
    <script src="/scripts/vendor-bundle.js" data-main="aurelia-bootstrapper"></script>
</div>

This code defines a div that will host an Aurelia application named main.

Add a link to the Aurelia application

Inside of the Views/Shared folder open _Layout.cshtml which is where the MVC application’s navigation bar is defined. Locate the navigation bar code and add a list item and link that points to the HomeController Aurelia action defined above. The following is the full navigation bar for the MVC application including the new link for Aurelia.

<div class="navbar-collapse collapse">
    <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
        <li><a asp-area="" asp-controller="Home" asp-action="Index">Home</a></li>
        <li><a asp-area="" asp-controller="Home" asp-action="Aurelia">Aurelia</a></li>
        <li><a asp-area="" asp-controller="Home" asp-action="About">About</a></li>
        <li><a asp-area="" asp-controller="Home" asp-action="Contact">Contact</a></li>
    </ul>
</div>

Adjust Aurelia’s baseUrl

Finally inside the aurelia_project folder open aurelia.json and adjust the baseUrl property inside the targets section to look for the scripts folder to be up one directory. This is required now with the Aurelia application being hosted inside the HomeController which will cause the Aurelia application to look for its scripts in the Home/Scripts folder instead of the site’s main scripts folder. If you are going to have multiple Aurelia applications per MVC application then you may need to take a different path on this section.

Before:
"build": {
  "targets": [
    {
      "id": "aspnetcore",
      "displayName": "ASP.NET Core",
      "output": "wwwroot\\scripts",
      "baseUrl": "scripts"
    }
  ]

After:
"build": {
  "targets": [
    {
      "id": "aspnetcore",
      "displayName": "ASP.NET Core",
      "output": "wwwroot\\scripts",
      "baseUrl": "../scripts"
    }
  ]

Wrap up

Run the application and click the Aurelia link in the navigation bar and the Aurelia application from last week will run, but now it will still have the navigation bar from the MVC application showing. The index.html file located in the wwwroot folder that was previously used to host the Aurelia application can be deleted.

The code associated with this post can be found here.