Question

A lot of my plain content is in the database, accessed by a custom CMS. Around the application I display simple “thank you” messages, etc. which consist of a controller action (simplified):

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

and my view:

@Html.GetContent("DetailsUpdated")

I have quite a few of these and its quite annoying having a lot of view files with one-liners in. I want to be able to return that content as a View, I can do return ContentResult(ContentRepository.GetContent("KEY")); but this returns as plain-text and there is no master view rendered.

So, basically, grab the content from the DB via ContentRepository.GetContent("KEY") (returns a string) and inject it into a master view, where RenderBody() is called. I’d like to have a custom ActionResult so I can just do:

public ActionResult DetailsUpdated()
{
    return DbContentResult();
}

and then the DbContentResult ActionResult will find the content key relative to the action and controller name, go to the database and retrieve the content and display it within its master view, no physical file view needed. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You may have one view file and refer to that view file from several actions:

public class FooBarController : Controller { 

    public ViewResult Foo() { 

        return View("FooView", ContentRepository.GetContent("KEY"));
    }
}

In this case, you will be able to render the view whose path is ~/Views/Shared/FooView.cshtml (unless you override the default convention of course).

Edit:

As you indicated, you can make a custom ViewResult which does this for you:

public class DbContentResult : ViewResult {

    public DbContentResult() {

        this.ViewName = "FooView";
        this.ViewData.Model = "Foo Model";
    }
}

Usage:

public ActionResult Index() {

    return new DbContentResult();
}

Or even better, write an extension method for Controller class which integrates with DbContentResult:

public static class ControllerExtensions {

    public static ViewResult DbContentResult(this Controller controller) {

        return new DbContentResult();
    }
}

Usage:

public ActionResult Index() {

    return this.DbContentResult();
}