Custom tokens in view engine?

Question

In ASP.NET MVC 2 project, how might I go about writing a custom view engine that allows custom tokens to be used when searching for views?

Specifically, I'm trying to achieve this:

In PagesController:

public ActionResult ViewPage(string folder, string page)
{
  return View(folder, page);
}

I want the view engine to search for the view in the directory: /Views/Pages/[folder]/

How might I achieve this without knowing the folder names ahead of time? Ideally, this customized view engine would only be used for this single controller.

Answer 1

You don't need to implement your own viewengine to solve this issue. You can simply supply the path to the view you want. Something like this:

return View("~/Views/Pages/FolderName/ViewName.aspx");

You example could look something like this:

public ActionResult ViewPage(string folder, string page) {
    return View(string.Format("~/Views/Pages/{0}/{1}.aspx", folder, page));
}

Answer 2

If these values change by request (...it looks like that) then you need to overwrite CreateView. I have not done it myself but in one question on SO somebody said its possible:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3063619/localization-with-separate-language-folders-within-views/3065647#3065647