Question

I have been writing a cms with MVC being used as the main engine for generating the pages.

I am going well, but wanted the ability to create a unique razor template per site and possibly per view if I need to.

My rules are that each project has to have a unique code which is linked with a url.

Assets for each project site are stored in a way that the location relates to the project.

So an assets associated with project C0001 would be stored in assets\C0001\ and for C0002: assets\C0002\ and so on.

What I wanted to do, to keep things tidy, was to have the razor templates associated with a project located in the assets\[ProjectCode] location too, but the problem is I am getting an error about ViewBag not existing in context.

So this won’t work:

Layout = string.Concat("~/assets/",ViewBag.ProjectNumber,"/_Layout.cshtml");

Where as the following will render a page:

Layout = string.Concat("~/Views/Shared/_",ViewBag.ProjectNumber,"Layout.cshtml");

I am guessing the first layout doesnt render, because it is outside of the known search areas for views? But as I am telling it where the file is, I dont see what the problem is?

I am happy to work using the code in example 2, but could mean after a fair number of project sites the Shared views diretory will become very busy.

Just wondering if there is a reason why Views need to exist in the Views Directory?

Answer 1

You need to copy the web.config that is located in your Views directory and put the copy in your Assets directory. Since you need to supply a full path for layouts this is not a search path issue, it needs the info in the web.config to initialise the view properly.