Question

In Razor, I have a few that’s located in "~/areas/shared/views/shared/_partialName.cshtml". If I do simply @{ Html.RenderPartial("_partialName", myModel"); } in my view, it cannot find it. I instead have to fully qualify the path to that partial.

Can I tell my project to include the folder "~/areas/shared/views/shared/" in the list of folders it crawls when trying to find partials? This way I can keep the snippet of code in my view to render that partial nice and short. Thanks!

Answer 1

The RazorViewEngine class contains properties which have patterns for where it should look for various view files – areas, partials, everything. You can override it pretty easily and tell your application in Globals.asax to use your implementation instead:

public class MyViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{
    public MyViewEngine()
    {
        // Use the standard partials location in addition to this location
        // {0} is the partial view name, {1} is the controller name
        String[] morePartialLocations = new String[] {
            "~/areas/shared/views/shared/{0}.cshtml"
        };
        PartialViewLocationFormats =
            PartialViewLocationFormats.Concat(morePartialLocations).ToArray();
    }
}

// in Globals.asax

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ...
    ViewEngines.Engines.Clear();
    ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyViewEngine());
    ...
}

Note that since it sounds like you’re working with Areas, there’s another property that you can override called AreaViewLocationFormats which you can update in the same manner and insert “{2}” as the name of the area.