Question

I have an ASP.NET Web Forms APP, I want to migrate it to ASP.NET MVC a piece at a time. I have setup MVC to run within the webforms app. I have everything set up appropriately such that if I put my ASP.NET MVC folders (Controllers, Views) in a subfolder called MVC in the project, and set my routes in my global asax to

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.aspx/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.MapRoute("Default", // Route name
        "w/{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" } // Parameter defaults
    );
}

protected void Application_Start()
{
    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

All of the config and assembly references are setup. If I debug I can hit a breakpoint that is inside my Index method, on my Home controller.

public class HomeController
    : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        this.HttpContext.Trace.Write("Hrm...");
        return View("index", (object)"Hello");
    }
}

The problem that is occurring is that

return View("index", (object)"Hello");

Does not return an error status code or the search list you’d expect typically if MVC can’t locate the view. Instead I am getting a 200 http response, and nothing in the content body of the response.

Here are the http request details:

GET http://localhost.:2396/w/home/index2 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MS-RTC LM 8; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: localhost.:2396
Pragma: no-cache
Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=3yqf2t55sckemhmxq2bhibmq

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/9.0.0.0
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 12:42:43 GMT
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0
Connection: Close

That request above goes to index2, which is an action that doesn’t exist and it doesn’t give me an error. I suspect the ViewResult in the index action is throwing an exception but somehow it’s getting supressed somewhere. I inherited this code base, so I’m just trying to figure out whats going on.

In the web.config i’ve configured the error handling such that i should be able to see any errors messages, but that still doesn’t explain why the http status code is always 200.

<customErrors mode="Off"/>

<httpErrors errorMode="DetailedLocalOnly"/>

Another quick note, is if i replace

return View("index", (object)"Hello");

with

return Content("abc");

It will correctly output “abc” in the content body of the http response.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Seems like your view is in wrong location because you mentioned that Controller, Views are under a folder called “MVC”.

The “Views” folder should be under the root directory, that is the place where ViewEngine looks for the views.

Update:
You can override this default behavior using a custom ViewEngine. For that implement IViewEngine interface and it has got a method called FindView where you can implement your own logic to scan different location.