Error with View outside Views folder

Question

I'm trying to add a View to an arbitrary folder in my MVC project (~/SomeOtherViewDirectory). This works fine until I modify the View to use be strongly typed.

Ie, if the page inherits from System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage, it compiles and runs fine, but if it inherits from System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage it does not. When I turn page compilation on, it won't compile (can't find type) otherwise it throws a runtime exception.

I'm using a custom ViewEngine -- it's just the standard WebFormsViewEngine with customized location strings for finding the View.

Funny thing about this is that the same (empty) page works inside the Views directory. And I can modify my ViewEngine to point to some sub-sub-sub directory of Views (say, ~/Views/This/Is/Weird/) and copy/paste the page there and everything compiles and runs fine.

WTH?

Answer 1

For views outside the Views folder we need to modify the web.config. If you check the web.config in the views folder, you'll notice this additional configuration, either create a new web.config in those additional folders, or add it to the root web.config file.

<pages
  pageParserFilterType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewTypeParserFilter, System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
  pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage, System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
  userControlBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl, System.Web.Mvc, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">

Try that and hopefully that should sort your problem out.