Friday, June 3, 2011

MVC - Using Views outside of /Views or other content in /Views

I learned something new recently regarding this subject.
First - to use a View outside of the /Views folder you must put a copy of your web.config from /Views into your new folder. It's that simple.

Secondly - Views by default won't allow other content in them. If you drop a css file in the /Views folder and reference it via http://localhost/views/test.css you will get a 404 file not found error.

If we look in the web.config inside of our views, we have:

<system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add path="*" verb="*" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler"/>
    </httpHandlers>


This essentially says make any item referenced in /Views (from path="*") a 404 status code - hence file not found. This means you can't address css files, jpegs, etc. - anything inside of /Views.
The workaround is easy though. Simply change the defined handler to exclude ONLY *.cshtml (hence views)

Ideally we probably want to exclude *.cshtml and *.aspx in case we have any web forms view engine code. Unfortunately IIS6 and IIS7 have different syntax here. Changing the web.config in the /Views folder we have:

IIS6:
<system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add path="*.cshtml,*.aspx" verb="*" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
    </httpHandlers>
  </system.web>

In IIS7:
<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <add name="ExcludeRazorViews" path="*.cshtml" verb="*" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
      <add name="ExcludeWebFormsViews" path="*.aspx" verb="*" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
    </handlers>
  </system.webServer>

Note also that the web.config in the /Views folder also contains this one as well at the bottom you'll need to watch out for that is provided for IIS 7 compatibility:
    <handlers>
      <remove name="BlockViewHandler"/>
      <add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
    </handlers>

3 comments:

  1. 1- Make new folder in Views, eg. myFolder
    2- Add your static page, eg. filename.cshtml
    3- Copy the web.config file from "Views" folder and paste it to the new folder you just created inside Views (eg. myFolder)
    4- In the pasted web.config Replace
    this :

    with this :


    Resault :
    Any file in this folder will work without routing!

    Freedom to Palestine, from palestinian programmer

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. it depends on your version of iis, note the difference settings above

      Delete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.