asp.net mvc - How to set a Default Route (To an Area) in MVC

Question

Ok this has been asked before but there is no solid solution out there. So for purpose of myself and others who may find this useful.

In MVC2 (ASP.NET) I want it so when someone navigates to the website, there is a default area specified. So navigating to my site should send you to ControllerX ActionY in AreaZ.

Using the following route in the Global.asax

routes.MapRoute(
                "Area",
                "",
                new { area = "AreaZ", controller = "ControllerX ", action = "ActionY " }
            );

Now this works as in it does try to serve the correct page. However MVC proceeds to look for the View in the root of the site and not in the Area folder.

Is there a way to resolve this?

EDIT

There is a 'Solution' and that is in ControllerX, ActionY return the full path of the view. Bit of a hack but it does work. However I'm hoping there is a better solution.

         public ActionResult ActionY()
        {
            return View("~/Areas/AreaZ/views/ActionY.aspx");
        }

Edit:

This also becomes an issue when having a HTML ActionLink of the page. If the area is not set the Action Link is output blank.

Is all of this by design or a flaw?

Answer 1

This one interested me, and I finally had a chance to look into it. Other folks apparently haven't understood that this is an issue with finding the view, not an issue with the routing itself - and that's probably because your question title indicates that it's about routing.

In any case, because this is a View-related issue, the only way to get what you want is to override the default view engine. Normally, when you do this, it's for the simple purpose of switching your view engine (i.e. to Spark, NHaml, etc.). In this case, it's not the View-creation logic we need to override, but the FindPartialView and FindView methods in the VirtualPathProviderViewEngine class.

You can thank your lucky stars that these methods are in fact virtual, because everything else in the VirtualPathProviderViewEngine is not even accessible - it's private, and that makes it very annoying to override the find logic because you have to basically rewrite half of the code that's already been written if you want it to play nice with the location cache and the location formats. After some digging in Reflector I finally managed to come up with a working solution.

What I've done here is to first create an abstract AreaAwareViewEngine that derives directly from VirtualPathProviderViewEngine instead of WebFormViewEngine. I did this so that if you want to create Spark views instead (or whatever), you can still use this class as the base type.

The code below is pretty long-winded, so to give you a quick summary of what it actually does: It lets you put a {2} into the location format, which corresponds to the area name, the same way {1} corresponds to the controller name. That's it! That's what we had to write all this code for:

BaseAreaAwareViewEngine.cs

public abstract class BaseAreaAwareViewEngine : VirtualPathProviderViewEngine
{
    private static readonly string[] EmptyLocations = { };

    public override ViewEngineResult FindView(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName,
        string masterName, bool useCache)
    {
        if (controllerContext == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("controllerContext");
        }
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException(viewName,
                "Value cannot be null or empty.");
        }

        string area = getArea(controllerContext);
        return FindAreaView(controllerContext, area, viewName,
            masterName, useCache);
    }

    public override ViewEngineResult FindPartialView(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialViewName,
        bool useCache)
    {
        if (controllerContext == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("controllerContext");
        }
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(partialViewName))
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException(partialViewName,
                "Value cannot be null or empty.");
        }

        string area = getArea(controllerContext);
        return FindAreaPartialView(controllerContext, area,
            partialViewName, useCache);
    }

    protected virtual ViewEngineResult FindAreaView(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string areaName, string viewName,
        string masterName, bool useCache)
    {
        string controllerName =
            controllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller");
        string[] searchedViewPaths;
        string viewPath = GetPath(controllerContext, ViewLocationFormats,
            "ViewLocationFormats", viewName, controllerName, areaName, "View",
            useCache, out searchedViewPaths);
        string[] searchedMasterPaths;
        string masterPath = GetPath(controllerContext, MasterLocationFormats,
            "MasterLocationFormats", masterName, controllerName, areaName,
            "Master", useCache, out searchedMasterPaths);
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewPath) &&
            (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(masterPath) || 
              string.IsNullOrEmpty(masterName)))
        {
            return new ViewEngineResult(CreateView(controllerContext, viewPath,
                masterPath), this);
        }
        return new ViewEngineResult(
            searchedViewPaths.Union<string>(searchedMasterPaths));
    }

    protected virtual ViewEngineResult FindAreaPartialView(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string areaName,
        string viewName, bool useCache)
    {
        string controllerName =
            controllerContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller");
        string[] searchedViewPaths;
        string partialViewPath = GetPath(controllerContext,
            ViewLocationFormats, "PartialViewLocationFormats", viewName,
            controllerName, areaName, "Partial", useCache,
            out searchedViewPaths);
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(partialViewPath))
        {
            return new ViewEngineResult(CreatePartialView(controllerContext,
                partialViewPath), this);
        }
        return new ViewEngineResult(searchedViewPaths);
    }

    protected string CreateCacheKey(string prefix, string name,
        string controller, string area)
    {
        return string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
            ":ViewCacheEntry:{0}:{1}:{2}:{3}:{4}:",
            base.GetType().AssemblyQualifiedName,
            prefix, name, controller, area);
    }

    protected string GetPath(ControllerContext controllerContext,
        string[] locations, string locationsPropertyName, string name,
        string controllerName, string areaName, string cacheKeyPrefix,
        bool useCache, out string[] searchedLocations)
    {
        searchedLocations = EmptyLocations;
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(name))
        {
            return string.Empty;
        }
        if ((locations == null) || (locations.Length == 0))
        {
            throw new InvalidOperationException(string.Format("The property " +
                "'{0}' cannot be null or empty.", locationsPropertyName));
        }
        bool isSpecificPath = IsSpecificPath(name);
        string key = CreateCacheKey(cacheKeyPrefix, name,
            isSpecificPath ? string.Empty : controllerName,
            isSpecificPath ? string.Empty : areaName);
        if (useCache)
        {
            string viewLocation = ViewLocationCache.GetViewLocation(
                controllerContext.HttpContext, key);
            if (viewLocation != null)
            {
                return viewLocation;
            }
        }
        if (!isSpecificPath)
        {
            return GetPathFromGeneralName(controllerContext, locations, name,
                controllerName, areaName, key, ref searchedLocations);
        }
        return GetPathFromSpecificName(controllerContext, name, key,
            ref searchedLocations);
    }

    protected string GetPathFromGeneralName(ControllerContext controllerContext,
        string[] locations, string name, string controllerName,
        string areaName, string cacheKey, ref string[] searchedLocations)
    {
        string virtualPath = string.Empty;
        searchedLocations = new string[locations.Length];
        for (int i = 0; i < locations.Length; i++)
        {
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(areaName) && locations[i].Contains("{2}"))
            {
                continue;
            }
            string testPath = string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
                locations[i], name, controllerName, areaName);
            if (FileExists(controllerContext, testPath))
            {
                searchedLocations = EmptyLocations;
                virtualPath = testPath;
                ViewLocationCache.InsertViewLocation(
                    controllerContext.HttpContext, cacheKey, virtualPath);
                return virtualPath;
            }
            searchedLocations[i] = testPath;
        }
        return virtualPath;
    }

    protected string GetPathFromSpecificName(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string name, string cacheKey,
        ref string[] searchedLocations)
    {
        string virtualPath = name;
        if (!FileExists(controllerContext, name))
        {
            virtualPath = string.Empty;
            searchedLocations = new string[] { name };
        }
        ViewLocationCache.InsertViewLocation(controllerContext.HttpContext,
            cacheKey, virtualPath);
        return virtualPath;
    }


    protected string getArea(ControllerContext controllerContext)
    {
        // First try to get area from a RouteValue override, like one specified in the Defaults arg to a Route.
        object areaO;
        controllerContext.RouteData.Values.TryGetValue("area", out areaO);

        // If not specified, try to get it from the Controller's namespace
        if (areaO != null)
            return (string)areaO;

        string namespa = controllerContext.Controller.GetType().Namespace;
        int areaStart = namespa.IndexOf("Areas.");
        if (areaStart == -1)
            return null;

        areaStart += 6;
        int areaEnd = namespa.IndexOf('.', areaStart + 1);
        string area = namespa.Substring(areaStart, areaEnd - areaStart);
        return area;
    }

    protected static bool IsSpecificPath(string name)
    {
        char ch = name[0];
        if (ch != '~')
        {
            return (ch == '/');
        }
        return true;
    }
}

Now as stated, this isn't a concrete engine, so you have to create that as well. This part, fortunately, is much easier, all we need to do is set the default formats and actually create the views:

AreaAwareViewEngine.cs

public class AreaAwareViewEngine : BaseAreaAwareViewEngine
{
    public AreaAwareViewEngine()
    {
        MasterLocationFormats = new string[]
        {
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.master",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.master",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.master",
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.master"
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
        };
        ViewLocationFormats = new string[]
        {
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx",
            "~/Areas/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",
            "~/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx"
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx"
            "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
        };
        PartialViewLocationFormats = ViewLocationFormats;
    }

    protected override IView CreatePartialView(
        ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath)
    {
        if (partialPath.EndsWith(".cshtml"))
            return new System.Web.Mvc.RazorView(controllerContext, partialPath