R – What should the view file/directory structure be in ASP.NET MVC

asp.net-mvcdirectory-structure

I'm confused with how views are organized, and it is important to understand this as ASP.NET MVC uses conventions to get everything working right.

Under the views directory, there are subdirectories. Inside these subdirectories are views. I'm assuming that the subdirectories map to controllers, and the controllers act on the views contained within their subdirectories.

Is there an emerging expectation of what types of views are contained within these directories? For instance, should the default page for each directory be index.aspx? Should the pages follow a naming convention such as Create[controller].aspx, List[controller].aspx, etc? Or does it not matter?

Best Answer

View directory naming and file naming are important, because the ASP.NET MVC framework makes certain assumptions about them. If you do not conform to these assumptions, then you must write code to let the framework know what you are doing. Generally speaking, you should conform to these assumptions unless you have a good reason not to.

Let's look at the simplest possible controller action:

    public ActionResult NotAuthorized()
    {
        return View();
    }

Because no view name has been specified in the call to View(), the framework will presume that the view filename will be the same as the Action name. The framework has a type called ViewEngine which will supply the extension. The default ViewEngine is WebFormViewEngine, which will take that name and append an .aspx to it. So the full filename in this case would be NotAuthorized.aspx.

But in which folder will the file be found? Again, the ViewEngine supplies that information. With WebFormViewEngine, it will look in two folders: ~/Views/Shared and ~/Views/{controller}

So if your controller was called AccountController, it would look in ~/Views/Account

But there might be times when you don't want to follow these rules. For instance, two different actions might return the same view (with a different model, or something). In this case, if you specify the view name explicitly in your action:

    public ActionResult NotAuthorized()
    {
        return View("Foo");
    }

Note that with WebFormViewEngine, the "view name" is generally the same as the filename, less the extension, but the framework does not require that of other view engines.

Similarly, you might also have a reason to want your application to look for views and non-default folders. You can do that by creating your own ViewEngine. I show the technique in this blog post, but the type names are different, since it was written for an earlier version of the framework. The basic idea is still the same, however.

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