Is it possible to distribute an EditorTemplate control ASCX along with a type in a library project and have it be used by MVC3 when the type is rendered with the EditorFor() method?
Where I work we have a lot of DateTime, Gender and a few more custom fields which have a specific but concsistent way of (HTML) input and a corresponding backing ViewModel type for them (i.e. DateTimeViewModel with separate month, day, year field etc.) and they are in a shared library project.
However we still have to copy the EditorTemplates for these types to each project which is not very DRY.
So is there a way to bundle such EditorTemplate along with the library project and make sure that it’s used when the corresponding ViewModel is used without having to copy all EditorTemplate to every projects?
You need a custom VirtualPathProvider to achieve this but nothing out of the box. Here’s a blog post you may take a look at.
Disclaimer: Custom VirtualPathProviders don’t work with precompiled web applications. So if you intend to precompile your web application before shipping don’t use virtual path providers.
Because of this limitation personally I use custom NuGet packages that allow the developers to pull all the necessary templates to their corresponding locations.