ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom view engine

Question

hi,

Im developing a custom view engine for implementing themes for my asp.net mvc 2 web app. The problem that I am facing is that in this function:

public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache)

The parameter "masterName" is always empty, although the viewName is not empty and that view has a master page associated to it.

I would like to know the master page, so I can have a default theme and allow to create a theme that only changes the masterpages but not the content pages. So when a theme is selected, I want to use the masterpage of the theme but the content page of the default theme. But also I want to give the ability to create themes that override the master page and some content pages, and some other not. For this I would only need the masterName that the page is using, but I receive an empty string :(

Do you have any ideas?

Thanks in advance! Juan

Answer 1

The parameter "masterName" is optional. By default a view will use the master page defined in the View, but if the paraeter is specified it will override this with the mast page supplied.

eg:

Return View("viewname", Model); // uses default master page
Return View("viewname", Model, "MasterName"); // users supplied MasterName

Therefore one solution is to leave the master name value blank, unless overriden by a selected theme, and only then to override it in the View call. This doesn't need a custom view engine