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 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 ViewModel with that name is needed, we will now check if the file is newer on disk than when we read it last.
If so, we will re-read it.
The razor pages displayed by Turnkey will also see if there is a newer version read since 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 rest starts - since the views now kept in memory will be only the ones actually requested by any user.
Limitations[edit source]
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 done to any other file in this location are ignored and will have no effect on the application whatsoever.
See also: ModlrLeanLoad