mvc 3 razor view engine using "default" views

i'm using Razor for a new project in my company, and i have been playing with it for 2 days and already found some weird behaviour imho.

I have a home controller in the root of my webapp and a home controller in an area , call it Area1. In both 开发者_运维技巧these controllers I have an Index action and therefore I got an Index view in the Views root folder, and another one in the Area1\Views folder. If I remove the index view within the area , so Area1\Views\Index.cshtml and I request Area1\Home\Index, I don't get an error about the view engine not finding the view for that action , but the "base" Index view is found in \Views\Index.cshtml and rendered.

Someone knows if this is a bug or it's done by purpose ? If so, there's any way to disable this default ?

Definitely NOT a bug.

This behaviour allows easy reuse of View templates, eg, for error handling.

The default behaviour for ASP.NET MVC is that if you do...:

return View();

...it searches for the view template with the name of the action to use in a number of places: the default naming convention folder for the controller, ie, /Area1/Views/Home/, then /Area1/Views/Shared/ then Area1/Views/ then /Views/Shared/ then /Views/

If it finds no such View matching the name of the action, then it throws an error.

So much for the default behaviour. To "customize" this behaviour, you just need to do the following:

In your controller actions, you can specify the name of the View template to use when you return. EG:

return View("MyOtherView");

or better still, if using T4MVC:

return View(MVC.Area1.Home.Views.MyOtherView);  // does away with "magic" strings

As a result, I don't see that you need to switch off the default behaviour to be able to do (whatever) you want. Controllers are there to, uhmmmm, control what views are used to display to the user. That is the best practice.

However, ASP.NET MVC is very configurable, so there are ways and means, I presume, to switch this off.

If you want to do this, good luck to you, but it makes much more sense to follow the defaults and get to understand how ASP.NET MVC works, especially if you are a beginner.

NOTE:

The above applies to ASP.NET MVC 1, 2, 3 and will continue to do so. It is the default behaviour for all View engines, including Razor and WebForm Views.

PS:

And you can configure the urls using route registration if your concern is the look of the url in the user's browser.