How to change default view location scheme in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I want to change view locations at runtime based on current UI culture. How can I achieve this with default Web Form view engine?

Basically I want to know how implement with WebFormViewEngine something what is custom IDescriptorFilter in Spark.

Is there other view engine which gives me runtime control over view locations?

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Edit: My URLs should looks following {lang}/{controller}/{action}/{id}. I don't need language dependent controllers and views are localized with resources. However few of the views will be different in some languages. So I need to tell view engine to looks to the language specific folder first.

Answer 1

A simple solution would be to, in your Appication_Start get hold of the appropriate ViewEngine from the ViewEngines.Engines collection and update its ViewLocationFormats array and PartialViewLocationFormats. No hackery: it's read/write by default.

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ...
    // Allow looking up views in ~/Features/ directory
    var razorEngine = ViewEngines.Engines.OfType<RazorViewEngine>().First();
    razorEngine.ViewLocationFormats = razorEngine.ViewLocationFormats.Concat(new string[] 
    { 
        "~/Features/{1}/{0}.cshtml"
    }).ToArray();
    ...
    // also: razorEngine.PartialViewLocationFormats if required
}

The default one for Razor looks like this:

ViewLocationFormats = new string[]
{
    "~/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
    "~/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",
    "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
    "~/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml"
};

Note that you may want to update PartialViewLocationFormats also.