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Base namespace, base URL, and links to other web sites

Starting with PageMethods 1.6, you can use the following features:

1. Base namespace. Previously, the methods generated by PageMethods were placed in the MyPageMethods namespace. It is now possible to exchange this namespace with any of your liking.
2. Base URL. With the previous versions, the URLs generated for every page methods were relative to the referencing page. They were starting with ~/ and resolved automatically if used in the NavigateUrl property. It was possible to make the URLs absolute - to the application - by using PageMethodsEngine.ResolveUrl() on them.
   It is now possible to specify a base URL to serve as the root for the generated URLs.
   If you use Visual Studio 2005 Web Applications - the default model for Visual Studio 2003 - you can import PageList.xml files from other sites to be able to reference them. Support for BaseUrl is also provided for Visual Studio 2005 Web Sites.

These features are supported by PageMethods for VS 2003 and 2005.

Used together, these two features provide a complete solution to reference at the same time the current web site and remote web sites.

1) Base namespace

To specify the base namespace of your choice, you have two options:

1. In a Web Application or Visual Studio 2003, change the "Custom Tool Namespace" property of the PageList.xml file to any namespace of your choice.
   
   
    
2. If you use Web Sites (VS 2005's default mode) or even Web Applications, you can edit the PageList.xml file and change the baseNamespace attribute in Pages/Settings to any namespace of your choice.
   
   

Once you have done that, you don't reference your page methods through the MyPageMethods namespace anymore, but through your own namespace

Please note that you should avoid using the same namespace as the web project to avoid name conflicts.

2) Base URL

To specify the base URL to use, you have three options:

1. In a Web Application or Visual Studio 2003, append the base URL to the "Custom Tool Namespace" property of the PageList.xml file. The separator is the vertical bar, which gives something like: "MyPageMethods|http://mysite.com".
   
   
    
2. If you use Web Sites (VS 2005's default mode) or even Web Applications, you can edit the PageList.xml file and set the baseUrl attribute in Pages/Settings.
   
   
    
3. At runtime, you can change MyPageMethods.PageMethodsSettings.BaseUrl. The default value comes from the "Custom Tool Namespace" property or from the XML file.
   Changing the base URL at runtime is useful typically when you want to use a value contained in a configuration file.
   
   

If we don't specify a base URL for our page methods, the URL for MyPageMethods.Customer.Display(12) results in something like "~/customer/12.aspx".
If we use "http://mysite.com" as the base URL for our page methods, the URL becomes "http://mysite.com/customer/12.aspx".

3) Referencing other web sites

Now that we have seen how to specify a base namespace and a base URL, we are able to "import" web sites in our projects to create links to them.
All we have to do is:

1. Integrate an external PageList.xml file in our project. The name of the file needs to be changed because we may have our own PageList.xml file in the project. Let's name it Site2PageList.xml, for example.
2. Specify a base namespace for these imported page methods. Let's use Site2 for example.
3. Specify a base URL. Something like "http://site2.com/myapp" probably.

Once this is done, we are all set! We can now reference page methods from our site or from the external site.

Referencing web sites this way provides the same benefits that you get when you reference the pages of your site: code completion, typed parameters, named methods, in place documentation, etc.
Of course, you can import as many web sites as you want.