How to set up locations where view engine should find view in ASP .NET MVC3 or how to render view from another MVC application?

Question

For example I have two similar simple MVC applications.

Application1: HomeController -> Index action which returns AnotherHome view of

Application2: AnotherHomeController -> AnotherIndex action which also returns AnotherHome view

Application1 Index action:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return View("AnotherHome");
}

I need to run Application1 and render AnotherHome. When I run app it is obvious that I get the following error:

The view 'AnotherHome' or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations. The following locations were searched:
~/Views/Home/AnotherHome.aspx
~/Views/Home/AnotherHome.ascx
~/Views/Shared/AnotherHome.aspx
~/Views/Shared/AnotherHome.ascx
~/Views/Home/AnotherHome.cshtml
~/Views/Home/AnotherHome.vbhtml
~/Views/Shared/AnotherHome.cshtml
~/Views/Shared/AnotherHome.vbhtml

How can I force view engine to search view, for example, in Application2/Views/AnotherHome/AnotherIndex.cshtml ???

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 22 '12 at 06:49

1

The short answer is that you can't render a view that's in a different app's application directory. This is a security issue in IIS, and it won't let you access files outside of its application path.

A longer answer is that you could map a virtual directory in IIS into the app directory somewhere. But this would require specific IIS configuration to manage this, and it's something that can easily break if someone else is maintaining things.

It would probably be better to keep separate copies of the view anyways. What happens if you modify it for one app, and then it breaks the other?

answered Oct 22 '12 at 06:49

Erik Funkenbusch

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And what if I create my `Application2` inside `Application1`'s folder? – Dmytro Oct 23 '12 at 09:01
1

@DmytroTsiniavsky - Then One app can access the others folder, but the other one can't access the firsts – Erik Funkenbusch Oct 23 '12 at 15:25
So `Application1` can render `Application2`'s view if `Application2` is in `Application1`'s folder? – Dmytro Oct 23 '12 at 17:35

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

0

You will have to override the ASP.NET default view engine and override the view paths, however you will have to configure somewhere the location of the second application, unless you want to hardcode it. Refer to this question on how to change the view engine search paths, How to change default view location scheme in ASP.NET MVC?.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

Community

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answered Oct 22 '12 at 04:05

ryudice

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That's not really going to help. IIS won't let you render a page from outside of the apps application directory. This prevents so-called directory traversal vulnerabilities. – Erik Funkenbusch Oct 22 '12 at 06:46

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 30 '13 at 18:01

0

To share views between apps, compile the views into a dll (Google for razor generator) and share the dll

answered Nov 30 '13 at 18:01

Joep

11

How to set up locations where view engine should find view in ASP .NET MVC3 or how to render view from another MVC application?

3 Answers3