Question

In my /Views/Shared/ folder I created an EntityNotFound.cshtml razor view. In one of my controller actions I have the following call:

return View(MVC.Shared.Views.EntityNotFound, "Company");

This causes the following exception:

System.InvalidOperationException: The view ‘~/Views/Shared/EntityNotFound.cshtml’ or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations. The following locations were searched:

~/Views/Company/Company.cshtml

~/Views/Company/Company.vbhtml

~/Views/Shared/Company.cshtml

~/Views/Shared/Company.vbhtml

I am confused, because it does not even seem to be attempting to search ~/Views/Shared/EntityNotFound.cshtml. Even if I replace MVC.Shared.Views.EntityNotFound with "EntityNotFound" I get the same error.

Why is Asp.Net MVC not even attempting to find my shared view?

Answer 1

Have a look at the list of overloads for View();

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mvc.controller.view.aspx

Specifically, when you pass View(string,string); it sees the second string as the name of the master view.

Whats probably happening, is that it can’t find the “Company” master view, you’ll not the exception messages says

… or its master was not found…

Which means that it is probably finding the NotFoundException.cshtml, but can’t correctly find the Company.cshtml that it’s looking for as the master.