Question

Does anyone know if there is a reason why _ViewStart.cshtml wouldn’t get picked up with a Custom ViewEngine in MVC 3?

My Views now live at

~\UI\Views\

~\UI\Views\Shared\

with ViewStart being at ~\UI\Views_ViewStart.cshtml.

I’ve cleared out the existing RazorViewEngine and replaced it with mine in the global.asax and all the views resolve properly except none of the layout pages get applied unless I specify it individually in each view.

My engine path format code is:

        this.ViewLocationFormats = new[]
                                       {
                                           "~/UI/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml", 
                                           "~/UI/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
                                       };

        this.PartialViewLocationFormats = new[]
                                              {
                                                  "~/UI/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml", 
                                                  "~/UI/Views/Shared/Partial/{0}.cshtml", 
                                                  "~/UI/Views/{1}/Partial/{0}.cshtml"
                                              };

        this.AreaMasterLocationFormats = new[] 
                                            { 
                                                "~/UI/Views/Admin/Shared/{0}.cshtml" 
                                            };

        this.AreaPartialViewLocationFormats = new[]
                                                  {
                                                      "~/UI/Views/Admin/Shared/{0}.cshtml", 
                                                      "~/UI/Views/Admin/Shared/Partial/{0}.cshtml"
                                                  };

        this.AreaViewLocationFormats = new[] { "~/UI/Views/Admin/{1}/{0}.cshtml" };

    this.MasterLocationFormats = new[]
    {
         "~/UI/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
         "~/UI/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
    };

Thanks in advance,
Scott

Answer 1

Stupidity won this time, unfortunately. I had based my custom ViewEngine off some code I referenced from an article. Within the article, they detailed the override for CreateView. It had one of the boolean parameters (runViewStartPages) set to false but since it wasn’t a named argument, I missed over it.

public class XyzViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{    
    protected override IView CreateView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath)
    {
        return new RazorView(
            controllerContext,
            viewPath,
            masterPath,
            true, //<--- this drives whether to use _ViewStart pages.  It was set to false
            FileExtensions,
            ViewPageActivator
        );
    }
}