Question

I’m trying to molularize my ASP.NET MVC application by moving each Area into their own project. Everything was working fine until i decided to refactor out the AreaRegistration stuff and use my own approach (This way i can also register filters and dependencies within my module). Using reflector i have managed to come up with the following.

First i implement the following interface for each module/area:

public interface IModule {
    string ModuleName { get; }
    void Initialize(RouteCollection routes);
}

E.g.:

public class BlogsModule : IModule {
    public string ModuleName { get { return "Blogs"; } }

    public void Initialize(RouteCollection routes) {
        routes.MapRoute(
            "Blogs_Default",
            "Blogs/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { area = ModuleName, controller = "Home", action = "Index",
                id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new string[] { "Modules.Blogs.Controllers" }
        );
    }
}

Then in my Global.asax file (Application_Start event) i say:

// Loop over the modules
foreach (var file in Directory.GetFiles(Server.MapPath("~/bin"), "Modules.*.dll")) {
    foreach (var type in Assembly.LoadFrom(file).GetExportedTypes()) {
        if (typeof(IModule).IsAssignableFrom(type)) {
            var module = (IModule)Activator.CreateInstance(type);
            module.Initialize(RouteTable.Routes);
        }
    }
}

I then removed the existing AreaRegistration stuff. Everything is working fine up to this point. When i run my application and render the link to a module, e.g.:

@Html.ActionLink("Blogs", "Index", "Home", new { area = "Blogs" }, null)

The correct url is displayed but when i click on the url it displays the wrong view. After debugging it looks like the url is routed to the correct Action within the HomeController of my Blogs module. However it tries to display the Home/Index.cshtml view in the main project and not the one in the module/area. I’m guessing somewhere along the lines i have missed how to tell the view engine to treat the routed url as an area as it seems to be ignoring the AreaViewLocationFormats (inside the RazorViewEngine).

I’d appreciate it if someone could show me what i’m missing. Thanks

Answer 1

After further refactoring it appears that, the view engine looks for an area data token. I therefore changed the code to add routes in Initialize method of the module as:

// Create the route
var route = new Route("Blogs/{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary(new { area = ModuleName, controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcRouteHandler());

// Add the data tokens
route.DataTokens = new RouteValueDictionary();
route.DataTokens["area"] = this.ModuleName;
route.DataTokens["UseNamespaceFallback"] = false;
route.DataTokens["Namespaces"] = new string[] { "Modules.Blogs.Controllers" };

// Add the route
routes.Add(route);

Hope this helps.