While ASP.NET MVC promotes clean separation-of-concerns for your web applications, there are some short comings. A problem you’ll run into on large ASP.NET MVC projects is the Views section of your web application becomes completely crowded with hundreds or thousands of files.

Usually, these view files are organized into sections by controller which keeps this manageable. For example, your solution might look like:

• Controllers
• Models
• Views
  • Home
    • Index.cshtml
    • About.cshtml
  • Products
    • All.cshtml
    • Show.cshtml
    • New.cshtml
  • Shared
    • …
  • etc…

So that any one folder might only have 10 cshtml files. But there is one folder that is disproportionately crowed, that Shared folder where all the common partial views and layouts are kept. A quick look at one of my recent MVC projects shows 113 files in that shared folder!

A 113 files tossed into a single folder is painful to manage and difficult to find what you’re looking for at a glance. If they could be categorized into subfolders, say things like Shared/Navigation, Shared/Accounts, Shared/Users, things would be good again.

Presently MVC doesn’t look into subfolders of the shared views folder. But with a little open-source library I wrote and a few clicks on NuGet, it will!

Introducing Enhanced View Locations for MVC

To address this issue, I’ve created a project over at GitHub (recently moved from CodePlex):

       Enhanced View Locations for MVC
       https://github.com/mikeckennedy/enhanced_aspnet_mvc_views

With this library added to your project (via NuGet), your massive Shared folder can look like this:

Here’s how you use it (from the codeplex project documentation):

Enhanced View Locations for MVC allows you to further organize your ASP.NET MVC views without your action methods or Html.RenderPartial / Html.RenderAction elements knowing or caring about how they are organized or re-organized.

1. Begin by adding a reference to EnhancedViewLocations.dll to your ASP.NET MVC project via NuGet (http://nuget.org/List/Packages/EnhancedViewLocations) or by directly downloading and referencing it.

2. Next, define and register custom view locations in the form partial Uri’s from within the Global.asax file:

protected void Application_Start()
{
    AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
    RegisterGlobalFilters( GlobalFilters.Filters );
    RegisterRoutes( RouteTable.Routes );

    // Register the extra locations for views.
    RegisterCustomViewLocations();
}

private static void RegisterCustomViewLocations()
{
   // We can optionally enable the standard Razor view CS
   // (or VB) locations so we don't always search our
   // extra / custom areas first when searching for a view.
   // EnhancedViewLocator.EnableStandardRazorCSLocations();

   // Next, add two extra locations to store / arrange our views.

   // 1. in the templates folder under the standard shared view
   // folder.
   EnhancedViewLocator.AddFolder( "views/shared/templates" );

   // 2. in the navigation folder under the standard
   // shared view folder.
   EnhancedViewLocator.AddFolder( "views/shared/navigation" );

   // Finally, have the locator install a custom view
   // engine to manage the lookups.
   EnhancedViewLocator.Install( ControllerBuilder.Current );
}