Question

Is there any way of mapping multiple controllers to a single view directory? In my application I would like to have a 1 to 1 mapping between controllers and views. The reason for this is that each view will have a variety of ajax actions that the controller will provide methods for and having multiple views per controller will result in overly large controllers.

Presently I have something like this:

/Controllers
    /Dir1Controller
   ...

/Views
    /Dir1
        /FirstView.cshtml
        /SecondView.cshtml
        ...

So Dir1 Controller maps to the directory Dir1 and needs to provide all the actions for the views FirstView, SecondView, etc. Instead, I would prefer something like this:

/Controllers
    /FirstController
    /SecondController
   ...

Where both controllers map to Dir1 but return the appropriate view when an action is executed.

None of this seems to be a problem on the route mapping side of things but there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to tell it how to find the correct view. FirstController will only look in /Views/First for views. Is there any way I can direct it to look in /Views/Dir1?

I looked at using areas but they seem to be directed at spiting up large sites. Conceptually all of these pages should be part of the same area. I just want to keep the size of my controllers bounded.

Answer 1

If your Ajax calls are related to a single controller then stick to the existing pattern and have methods in your controller. If they can be reused put them in partial views or controllers organized by their purpose and when doing your Ajax calls simply request the controller and action. This is the typical pattern for a reason, why step outside of it? 🙂