I have a fairly large ASP MVC application. Instead of having many controllers all in the controller directory I would rather create some hierarchy. So I might have something like
~\Controllers\Security\
~\Controllers\Maintenance\
~\Controllers\Reports\
I would also like to be able to do similar with Views
~\Views\Security\Users\
~\Views\Security\Roles\
~\Views\Maintenance\Customer\
~\Views\Maintenance\Product\
Is this easily done?
I think you're looking for something like what the "master" says in this post:
http://haacked.com/archive/0001/01/01/areas-in-aspnetmvc.aspx
Basically you have to create a ViewEngine to specify where to look for the views. It's a fairly simple code, just don't forget to register it in the global.asax! As for the controller part you'll have to register new routes also in the global.asax.
The concept you're searching for is called "areas", as outlined by Phil Haack here: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/04/areas-in-aspnetmvc.aspx
I would think you'd need to write your own RouteHandler, which shouldn't be too tough.
A quick google search turned up: This blog post detailing it
Have you considered to switch to Features Folder. I've tried it (with little modifications) and it works pretty good.
Described in this post http://timgthomas.com/2013/10/feature-folders-in-asp-net-mvc/
Code examples are in Jimmiy Bogard's repo https://github.com/jbogard/presentations/tree/master/putyourcontrollersonadietv2
What you really want here is for your Views folder hierarchy to match the namespace hierarchy of your controllers. You can write a custom ViewEngine to do this fairly easily - see my ControllerPathViewEngine project on GitHub for details.
I've included a snippet of the ControllerPathRazorViewEngine class to outline how it works. By intercepting the FindView / FindPartialView methods and replacing the controller name with a folder path (based on controller namespace and name), we can get it to load views from nested folders within the main Views folder.
public class ControllerPathRazorViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{
//... constructors etc.
public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache)
{
return FindUsingControllerPath(controllerContext, () => base.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, masterName, useCache));
}
public override ViewEngineResult FindPartialView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialViewName, bool useCache)
{
return FindUsingControllerPath(controllerContext, () => base.FindPartialView(controllerContext, partialViewName, useCache));
}
private ViewEngineResult FindUsingControllerPath(ControllerContext controllerContext, Func<ViewEngineResult> func)
{
string controllerName = controllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller");
string controllerPath = controllerPathResolver.GetPath(controllerContext.Controller.GetType());
controllerContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = controllerPath;
var result = func();
controllerContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = controllerName;
return result;
}
}
