ASP.net MVC, display a view from another controller

Question

Is it possible to display a view from another controller?

Say for example I have a CategoriesController and a Category/NotFound.aspx view. While in the CategoriesController I can easly return View("NotFound").

Now say I have a ProductsController and an action and view to add a product. However, this action requires that we have a Category to add the Product to. For example Products/Add/?catid=10.

If I am not able to find the Category based on catid I want to show the NotFound view from the Categories controller instead of creating a CategoryNotFound view under the Products Controller.

Is this possible or am I structuring things in the wrong way? Is there a good way to do this?

Answer 1

Yes. By default, ASP.Net MVC checks first in \Views\[Controller_Dir]\, but after that, if it doesn't find the view, it checks in \Views\Shared.

The shared directory is there specifically to share Views across multiple controllers. Just add your View to the Shared subdirectory and you're good to go.

Answer 2

you can also call any controller from javascript/jQuery say you have controller returning 404 or some other usercontrol/page then, on some action, from your client code you can call some adress that will fire your controller and return result in html format your client code can take this returned result and put it wherever you want in you your page...

mvc rocks, don't you think? :)

cheers