Blocks without controller – how to structure views?

Jiri Cepelka

Vote:

Hi,

I would like to know how to structure views for blocks without controllers.

Beneath comes the details…

Documentation states “In Visual Studio, add a partial view with the same name as your block type and based on your block model class, to the Views/Shared folder of your project.” and “For performance reasons, it is recommended to use partial views directly, and not controllers, for block types.”.

So this implies there will be lot of views just placed in Views/Shared.

It can be used IViewTemplateModelRegistrator or PartialContentController approaches but this ones will eliminate the performance benifits, won’t they?

#185519

Edited, Nov 22, 2017 14:03

Johan Petersson

Vote:

I don't think you should be that worried about performance when using controllers for blocks. But if they're not needed, you should avoid them.

You can also create your own view engine and change how the partial views are discovered:

public class ViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{
    private static readonly string[] AdditionalPartialViewFormats =
    {
        "~/Views/{0}/Partials/Index.cshtml",
        "~/Views/Shared/PagePartials/{0}.cshtml",
        "~/Views/Shared/Partials/{0}.cshtml",
        "~/Views/Shared/Blocks/{0}.cshtml",
    };

    public ViewEngine()
    {
        this.PartialViewLocationFormats = this.PartialViewLocationFormats.Union(AdditionalPartialViewFormats).ToArray();
    }
}

And in Application_Start in Global you can register your custom view engine:

ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new ViewEngine());

#185530

Nov 22, 2017 16:59

Johan Petersson

Vote:

Someone did actually measure the difference https://hacksbyme.net/2017/09/26/performance-when-using-controllers-for-blocks/

#185535

Nov 22, 2017 17:04

Jiri Cepelka

Vote:

Great, both post are useful.

#185544

Nov 23, 2017 9:39

valdis

Vote:

it's much more fun when you throw feature folders in the game...

#185653

Nov 28, 2017 23:36

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Blocks without controller – how to structure views?