Webflow integration with .NET

Hello,

From a quick web search, it sounds like Webflow and .NET integration is possible, but I haven’t been able to find any indication of how it works apart from a past forum post that says “this can be done only be exporting your code. You’ll lose the ability to make design edits unless you manage to make some darn good habits.” This sounds like .NET integrations may potentially have some limitations, but I can find no further information.

Webflow definitely looks like a great front end tool, but we also need to understand how it can seamlessly integrate with our back end systems.

Thank you!

welcome to the forum @ewomack. Are we talking about the TLD .net or a system? I’m not sure which one you’re talking about. Could you clarify?

Hello @sarahfrison ! Thanks for your response. Sorry, I’ll try to be clearer, but I don’t mean the .net domain, I mean the Microsoft .NET development framework, with C#.

We have a lot of proprietary backend code that we use for data persistence and various other functionality and the majority of it is written in C#.NET. What I’m hoping to find out is how we would take a Webflow page and hook it up or integrate it with that code base. For example, how would we send a Weblow website’s form data through our .NET data layer and into our databases?

I hope I’m making some sense. Sorry if I’m not.

If you are exporting a Webflow site the process is no different then what you would do if you hand coded. I do this all the time with PHP. You are basically just converting pages over to your preferred application code and using the Webflow CSS and base JS as needed. If you are using razor, it is basically the same.

As to a form, the form action points wherever you have a processor using whatever HTTP verb you need to use or you could re-create the form making it dynamic.

Based on your questions, I gather your are a front end person. If that is the case I suggest doing an export and handing the code over to your developers to take a look. They could always pop back over here for some Q&A. Please forgive me in advance if I am mistaken.

Thanks for jumping in @webdev!

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Hello @webdev, thanks for the additional information and details. I am actually both a front-end and back-end person, or at least I have played both of those roles at various times, but I’m new to tools such as Webflow, so I’m just trying to connect the dots.

We would like to turn a portion, or possibly more, of our front-end work over to some of our business users. Using Webflow, it sounds like they would do their designing and updating in the tool and then export what they’ve done, then send it to development who would update the site using that export. In this scenario it sounds like we lose some of Webflow’s “real time” functionality for updating sites on the fly, if I’m understanding things correctly. That’s not necessarily a problem, I’m just trying to get a clear picture of how our particular scenario would work.

Hello again, I wonder if what I need is to get a good idea of what the paid versions of Webflow provide. We’re looking for decoupled CMS functionality with Bootstrap compatibility and it looks like the free version may have some limitations along those lines.

Hello - I located the API section of webflow (Webflow CMS API Reference) and I’m wondering if this is the answer that I’m looking for. We don’t want to upload .cvs files or download code files, we want a seamless interaction between the UI and backend layers. Perhaps the api layer is what I’m looking for? Does anyone have any more information on this? Is this only available with the paid version?

Actually, this thread may have answered my question:

It looks like webflow does not hook up to a database like a traditional CMS without exporting design files to another CMS. The comment in this thread that “CMS is a design tool” may finally answer this.