Question

I have a Controller called BaseController and Controller1 and Controller2 inherit from it.

All of the views for these controllers are under ~/Views/Base/ the reason for this is that Controller1 and 2 do the exact same thing but have custom attributes for certain things on some overriden actions.

I want to be able to point to ~/Views/Base as the location to look for views in both Controller1 and Controller2. Now can i do this without having to implement my own ViewLocator as per Dale’s solution in this post Views in separate assemblies in ASP.NET MVC

I would prefer to not throw all these views into ~/Views/Shared as they aren’t really shared except in between these two Controllers.

Answer 1

You could write a custom view engine in order to add this new location in the search list:

public class MyViewEngine : RazorViewEngine // WebFormViewEngine - if you are using WebForms
{
    public MyViewEngine()
    {
        ViewLocationFormats = base.ViewLocationFormats.Union(new[] 
        {
            "~/Views/Base/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Views/Base/{0}.vbhtml",
            "~/Views/Base/{0}.aspx",
            "~/Views/Base/{0}.ascx",
        }).ToArray();
    }
}

which will be registered in Application_Start:

ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyViewEngine());