Search for .cshtml in multiple locations in MVC 3?

Question

When a user comes to my site, there may be a template=foo passed in the query string. This value is being verified and stored in the Session.

My file layout looks like this:

- Views/
  - Templates/
    - test1/
      - Home
        - Index.cshtml
    - test2/
      - Home
        - List.cshtml
  - Home/
    - Index.cshtml

Basically, if a user requests Index with template=test1, I want to use Views/Templates/test1/Index.cshtml. If they have template=test2, I want to use Views/Home/Index.cshtml (because /Views/Templates/test2/Home/Index.cshtml doesn't exist). And if they do not pass a template, then it should go directly to Views/Home.

I'm new to MVC and .NET in general, so I'm not sure where to start looking. I'm using MVC3 and Razor for the view engine.

Not sure if it works, but try to return the view by `return View(string.Concat(Request.QueryString["template"], "/Index"))` — Oskar Kjellin, Jun 22 '11 at 21:35
A more elegant approach would be to derive from the Controller class and override the "View" method, if possible — Oskar Kjellin, Jun 22 '11 at 21:39

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 22 '11 at 21:51

1

You could modify Scott Hanselman's Mobile Device demo to fit your needs. Instead of checking the user agent or if it's a mobile device, you could put your logic in to check the query string or your Session vars.

answered Jun 22 '11 at 21:51

Chris

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Does this apply for using the Razor view engine? – Jack M. Jun 23 '11 at 16:48
Yes. You can use any view engine you'd like. There's an example in there where he uses both Razor and Webforms. – Chris Jun 23 '11 at 17:14

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

You can do this by creating a custom RazorViewEngine and setting the ViewLocationFormats property. There's a sample here that does it by overriding the WebFormViewEngine, but using the RazorViewEngine should work just as well:

public class CustomViewEngine : WebFormViewEngine
{
    public CustomViewEngine()
    {
        var viewLocations =  new[] {  
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",  
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",  
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx",  
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx",  
            "~/AnotherPath/Views/{0}.ascx"
            // etc
        };

        this.PartialViewLocationFormats = viewLocations;
        this.ViewLocationFormats = viewLocations;
    }
}

Search for .cshtml in multiple locations in MVC 3?

2 Answers2