ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and custom ViewEngine to allow for externally loaded Views

Question

I'm playing around a little with dividing up a MVC-site into several assemblies (ran into some issues earlier).

Now I have almost everything working, got the main MVC project that loads in any external assemblies it can find. The external assemblies are basically external areas. When I had it copy the Views and web.config to the main-sites Areas-folder everything worked just fine. Now, that folder will most likely start to get a little bloated after a while, so I thought I'd try to add in the Views as resources in the area-assembly instead, see how that worked.

Created my own VirtualPathProvider and my own VirtualFile, registered them with the HostingEnvironment thinking all was well. Turns out it only uses the VirtualPathProvider added to the HostingEnvironment at the first load, not by the following View-loads by the ViewEngine.. Ok fine, found a few examples of how you could get around this by implementing your own ViewEngine to use your own VPP. But yeah, this doesn't seem to be a workable solution for MVC 3..

As it turns out, neither RazorViewEngine nor WebFormViewEngine implement two of the "key-functions" it seems, FileExists and IsValidPath. These are inherited from BuildManagerViewEngine, and you know what? These methods are marked as sealed..

Anyone who has tried this with MVC 3 and perhaps could nudge me in the right direction? I've been staring at the MVC 3 source now for quite a while but I just can't see any way of doing this..

Answer 1

Now I feel a little stupid, it seems I loaded the VPP too late.. Had it in Application_Start, but when I moved it to my PreApplicationStartMethod instead, it was used by the ViewEngine. (So no implementation of ViewEngine seems to be needed, wey!)

Problem now is that when I try to get to a View that's stored as a resource, I get to download it instead of having it rendered.. But that's something different from this so!