Sitecore MVC - dynamic view location

Question

I have a site that requires "Theme" functionality. So, I created a bunch of views in the the "Themes" folder. for example:

/Themes/Theme 1/Views/Content.cshtml
/Themes/Theme 1/Views/Menu.cshtml
/Themes/Theme 2/Views/Content.cshtml
/Themes/Theme 2/Views/Menu.cshtml
/Themes/Theme 3/Views/Content.cshtml
/Themes/Theme 3/Views/Menu.cshtml

I also created Content and Menu view renderings and set the Path field to /Themes/Theme 1/Views/Content.cshtml and /Themes/Theme 1/Views/Menu.cshtml respectively.

What I need is to replace "Theme 1" with "Theme 2" somewhere in the sitecore pipeline, so that I can set the theme globally and dynamically load the views corresponding to that theme (instead of creating multiple "Menu" and "Content" view renderings).

Is there a way to do that?

Answer 1

So, this is what I did:

Create a class to process the RenderRendering pipeline process:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Caching;
using Sitecore.Mvc.Extensions;
using Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation;
using Sitecore.Sites;

namespace MyNamespace.Pipelines.Response.RenderRendering
{
    public class ReplacePathProcessor : Sitecore.Mvc.Pipelines.Response.RenderRendering.RenderRenderingProcessor
    {
        public override void Process(Sitecore.Mvc.Pipelines.Response.RenderRendering.RenderRenderingArgs args)
        {
            var viewRenderer = args.Rendering.Renderer as ViewRenderer;
            if (viewRenderer != null && viewRenderer.ViewPath.StartsWith("%Theme%"))
            {
                // Get the current site
                var site = Sitecore.Context.Site;
                // Get the master database
                var database = Sitecore.Data.Database.GetDatabase("master");
                // Get the root item
                var rootItem = database.GetItem(site.RootPath);
                // replace the path
                viewRenderer.ViewPath = viewRenderer.ViewPath.Replace("%Theme%", rootItem["Theme"]);
            }
        }
    }
}

Add a Configuration include

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <pipelines>
      <mvc.renderRendering>
        <processor type="MyNamespace.Pipelines.Response.RenderRendering.ReplacePathProcessor, __Code">
          <patch:attribute name="type">MyNamespace.Pipelines.Response.RenderRendering.ReplacePathProcessor, __Code</patch:attribute>
        </processor>
      </mvc.renderRendering>
    </pipelines>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Change the MvcSettings.RenderersViewFolder to:

<setting name="Mvc.RenderersViewFolder" value="/Themes" />

Change the ViewPath field for all my views to use the format: %Theme%/Views/{ViewName}.cshtml

Hope that helps someone.