Asp.net-mvc – Asp.net MVC – Can I load a view from a different view folder

asp.net-mvc

In my app I have a need to load the same view from two different controllers without placing the view in the shared views directory.

Basically I have this folder structure

Controllers
- EventsController.cs
- SearchController.cs
Views
- Events
  - Preview.aspx
- Search

basically picture it much the same as here on stack overflow. You get a preview of a bunch of questions under the questions link, but you also get an identically formatted page when you do a search in the search bar. The views and viewmodels are presumably identical.

Since the view I need for search is exactly the same as the view I need for events, I'd like to reuse the same view. I would however like to avoid using the shared directory for this specific view.

So my two part question is —

Is this possible, and if so how?
Is this bad practice?

Best Answer

Yes, you can. Simply return View("~/Views/Events/Preview.aspx").

However, i would advise against it for a number of reasons. The biggest being that this will be non-obvious to anyone trying to modify the code later (maybe even you) and might lead to potential errors.

A better approach might be to create a "Shared" view, or a shared partial view. My preference would be a shared partial view, then in your non-shared view render the partial view functionality you want.

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Use the base controllers File method.

public ActionResult Image(string id)
{
    var dir = Server.MapPath("/Images");
    var path = Path.Combine(dir, id + ".jpg"); //validate the path for security or use other means to generate the path.
    return base.File(path, "image/jpeg");
}

As a note, this seems to be fairly efficient. I did a test where I requested the image through the controller (http://localhost/MyController/Image/MyImage) and through the direct URL (http://localhost/Images/MyImage.jpg) and the results were:

MVC: 7.6 milliseconds per photo
Direct: 6.7 milliseconds per photo

Note: this is the average time of a request. The average was calculated by making thousands of requests on the local machine, so the totals should not include network latency or bandwidth issues.

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

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