The concept of Softview is the ability to make minor changes to a deployed system without needing to send up a new model and restart everything.

It is understandably very practical to patch views at a faster pace than a model deploy.

To facilitate this, both MDrivenTurnkey and MDrivenServer expand the complete model as files in the App_data/ModlrLeanComplete folder whenever a new model is detected (i.e., uploaded to the MDrivenServer).

All your ViewModels will thus end up in App_data/ModlrLeanComplete.

You can overwrite these with better versions by just copying the span file.

The next time a request for a ViewModel with that name is needed, we will now check if the file is newer on disk than it was when we last read it.

If so, we will re-read it.

The razor pages displayed by Turnkey will also see if there is a newer version than was read last time - and recompile a new Html version for delivery to the client.

This new Softview strategy will also lessen the memory usage of server software on the second and subsequent starts - since the views now kept in memory will be only the ones actually requested by any user.

Limitations

It is important to know that even if the complete model is available in App_data/ModlrLeanComplete - only the ViewModels (*.span) files are read from here at runtime. Changes made to any other file in this location are ignored and will have no effect on the application whatsoever.

See also: ModlrLeanLoad