MVC4 + MvcContrib + Shared Layout?

Question

I have a portable area in a separate assembly and want its View to populate via a call to RenderBody() in the shared _Layout.cshtml found in the main assembly. But the result I get is the contents of the View alone, as if _Layout.cshtml isn't even rendered. Further, none of the regions defined in the View (in the portable area) are rendered either - which is actually sort of expected since _Layout.cshtml seems to be ignored altogether.

So am I doing something wrong or am I misunderstanding how portable areas are designed to work? I was really hoping to use this functionality to move Views and regions to portable areas while maintaining the "master page" functionality in the main web application.

Answer 1

Apparently, portable areas must define the Layout they wish to be wrapped by. This fixed the issue, added to the View in the portable area:

@{ Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml"; }

I stumbled onto this which helped me, albeit indirectly:

http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/workitem/7126