How to put all my Controllers in a own classlibrary

Question

Can I configure MVC to directly look into a class library ("MyApp.Controllers" for example) instead of the foder Controllers?

Answer 1

Yes, you can. The easiest way is to add the namespace of your class library to the routers.MapRoute call in global.asax. This is how one of our configurations look like:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes, IEnumerable<string> controllerNamespaces)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.ashx/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new { favicon = @"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?" });

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Default",                                              // Route name
        "{controller}/{action}/{id}",                           // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" },  // Parameter defaults
        controllerNamespaces.ToArray()
        );
}

Notice that we use an overload of MapRoute that allows us to supply a string array of controller namespaces.

Another option is to implement a custom IControllerFactory, but that's more work and usually not necessary.

Answer 2

The ASP.NET MVC runtime knows nothing about a folder named 'Controllers', that is just a project structure convention. You can have your controllers on any assembly, on any namespace, and it should work without any special configuration.