How do you switch View Engines on the fly within an ASP.Net MVC Controller action?

Question

I want to write a custom view engine that returns custom text (like coma delimited) does anyone know how I'd change the view engine on the fly to handle this?

Answer 1

If I understood your question correctly, you want to use different views based on the parameters passed to the controller. If so, you can use this statement in the controller action:

return View("ViewName");

Otherwise, please clarify your question.

Answer 2

I'd create a custom ActionResult. I use Json() function to return a JsonResult when I need JSON as response. I use this code to fill a ExtJS tree using JSON data.

    public JsonResult Folders(string node)
    {

        var relativePath = (node == "root") ? "" : node;
        var path = Path.Combine(BASE_PATH, relativePath);
        var folder = new DirectoryInfo(path);
        var subFolders = folder.GetDirectories();
        var folders = new List<ExtJsTreeNode>();
        foreach (var subFolder in subFolders)
        {
            folders.Add(new ExtJsTreeNode(subFolder.Name, subFolder.FullName.Replace(BASE_PATH, ""), "folder"));
        }
        return Json(folders);

    }

    private class ExtJsTreeNode
    {

        public string text { get; set; }
        public string id { get; set; }
        public string cls { get; set; }

        public ExtJsTreeNode(string text, string id, string cls)
        {
            this.text = text;
            this.id = id;
            this.cls = cls;
        }

    }

A sample of a custom ActionResult here.

Answer 3

Your controller shouldn't know or care about this, other than which View to send the data to. The View can render in any format imaginable. I've got views that emit RSS (XML), etc. In the controller, either send it to the default view or explicitly identify the target view.