Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

Extending Views

Views are the most common type of result returned from actions. A view is generally some kind of template with code inside to customize the output based on the input (the model). ASP.NET MVC ships with two view engines installed by default: the Web Forms view engine (which has been in MVC since version 1.0) and the Razor view engine (which is new to MVC 3). Several third-party view engines are also available for MVC applications, including Spark, NHaml, and NVelocity.

Customizing View Engines

An entire book could be written on the subject of writing a custom view engine, and in truth, perhaps a dozen people would buy it. Writing a view engine from scratch is just not a task very many people need to do, and there is enough existing source code for functional view engines that those few users have good starting places from which to work. Instead, this section is devoted to the customization of the two existing view engines that ship with MVC.

The two view engine classes—WebFormViewEngine and RazorViewEngine—both derive from BuildManagerViewEngine, which itself derives from VirtualPathProviderViewEngine. Both the build manager and virtual path providers are features inside of the core ASP.NET run time. The build manager is the component that locates view files on disk (like .aspx or .cshtml files) and converts them into source code and compiles them. The virtual path provider helps to locate files of any type; by default, the system will look for files on disk, but ...