nopCommerce Customization with Controller Inheritance

Scope

The following article is based on the latest platform of nopCommerce as of today, version 3.1.

Scenario

Trying to customize the view by adding some extra custom text, the goal is ideally we will not change the existing controller in the nopCommerce platform to allow easier future upgrade.

Normally, we will create a widget plugin to do that, nice and neat that plugin is isolated from the page controller and allow easy plug and play. This would work fine for most people.

However, in certain scenarios, if the works required to be done in the controller is more complicated like introducing new services, security control etc, then we will need to modify the controller.

The gotcha is we don't want to change the existing controller for future upgrade, with IoC and OO architecture, one would think it is easy just to create a new controller to inherit from the existing controller for custom works, but life is not that easy.

Customization

CoreController

In CustomerController, we need to set the Register() as virtual. And that is only change required in our core controller, so that you can override its functionalities.

CustomController

Let's take CustomerController as an example and I want to override the Register().

I created my own CustomerController file inside a folder called Custom.

 

I gave it a namespace of Nop.Web.Controllers.Custom, and inherit from the Nop.Web.Controllers.CustomController.



You will need to set your constructor same as the parent controller, and use the keyword base to inherit from the base controller, pretty standard C# inheritance syntax.



You may override the Register() like the following. In this example, we changed the value of the ViewBag.Title only, but as you can imagine, you can initialize new objects or call other services, all be achieved.

RouteProvider

In the Nop.Web project, Infrastructure\RouteProvider.cs, we need to map the controller to a different namespace, so our custom controller will be used in place of the parent one.

View

For demonstration purpose, I updated the view as follow, but a more professional way by using theme can be found here.

Result

Compile the solution and head to register page, it should look like this.

IoC

What about IoC? How will the CustomController get instantiated? That is already handled by the Nop.Web.Framework.DependencyRegistrar that will register all controllers in the assembly.

Conclusion

As demonstrated, it is not horribly difficult to do customizations in nopCommerce, I only wish it could be easier with the RouteProvider part where I can instead just use the IoC to change the constructor only, then the Visual Studio would be smart enough to pick up the custom controller during compilation.