Skip to main content

A DD4T.net Implementation - Custom View Locations

Image
By
The entire need to have custom view locations started when I implemented my Component controllers as separate classes.

By default DD4T .net comes (or expects) one ComponentController class. In the Component Template metadata, we can specify the controller, action and view names to execute and use when DD4T renders a Component Presentation on this Component Template.

Since I have several Component controllers, for the sake of clarity and separation, I implemented several controller classes -- one for each Component controller I have. For example, I have a DeviceController that renders Component Presentations based on Schema Device.

DeviceController defines a simple Index method that is mapped from the Component Template metadata.

    public class DeviceController : MyControllerBase
    { 
        public ActionResult Index(int? publication, int? component, string view)
        {
            // code goes here
        }
    }

The moment I executed my code, I got nice and glorious InvalidOerationException stating that .NET MVC can't find my "Device.cshtml" view (which I had also mapped from the Component Template metadata):

[InvalidOperationException: The view 'Device' or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations. The following locations were searched:
~/Views/Device/Device.aspx
~/Views/Device/Device.ascx
~/Views/Shared/Device.aspx
~/Views/Shared/Device.ascx
~/Views/Device/Device.cshtml
~/Views/Device/Device.vbhtml
~/Views/Shared/Device.cshtml
~/Views/Shared/Device.vbhtml]

It seems the MVC view render engine expects my view inside a folder with the same name as the controller (i.e. in my case /Views/Device).

I would rather have all my Component views under folder ~/Views/Component and Page views under ~/Views/Page. Then all my partial views are under ~/Views/Shared.

It turns our the RazorViewEngine has a series of preconfigured search location patterns that it uses when looking for the view corresponding to a controller. All I had to do was to define my own search location patterns to use ~/Views/Component/, ~/Views/Page/ and ~/Views/Shared/. This can be done in the Global.asax.cs class, inside method OnApplicationStarted, by setting the RazorViewEngine property ViewLocationFormats:

protected override void OnApplicationStarted()
{
    RazorViewEngine razorEngine = ViewEngines.Engines.OfType<RazorViewEngine>().First();
    razorEngine.ViewLocationFormats = new string[]
    {
        "~/Views/Component/{0}.cshtml",
        "~/Views/Page/{0}.cshtml",
        "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
    };
}


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as...
2 comments
Read more

REL Standard Tag Library

By
The RSTL is a library of REL tags providing standard functionality such as iterating collections, conditionals, imports, assignments, XML XSLT transformations, formatting dates, etc. RSTL distributable is available on my Google Code page under  REL Standard Tag Library . Always use the latest JAR . This post describes each RSTL tag in the library explaining its functionality, attributes and providing examples. For understanding the way expressions are evaluated, please read my post about the  Expression Language used by REL Standard Tag Library . <c:choose> / <c:when> / <c:otherwise> Syntax:     <c:choose>         <c:when test="expr1">             Do something         </c:when>         <c:when test="expr2">             Do something else         </c:when...
2 comments
Read more

Publish Binaries to Mapped Structure Groups

By Unknown
Today's TBB of the Week comes from the high demand in the field to publish binary assets to different mapped Structure Groups. By default SDL Tridion offers two ways of publishing binaries: All binaries publish to a folder defined in your Publication properties; All binaries rendered by a given template publish to a folder corresponding to a given Structure Group; In my view, both cases are terrible, over-simplified and not representing a real use-case. Nobody in the field wants all binaries in one folder and nobody separates binary locations by template. Instead, everybody wants a mapping mechanism that takes a binary and publishes it to a given folder, defined by a Structure Group, and this mapping is done using some kind of metadata. More often than not, the metadata is the TCM Folder location of the Multimedia Component. I have seen this implemented numerous times. So the solution to publish binaries to a given location implies finding a mapping from a TCM Folder to a...
10 comments
Read more