Why is cshtml extension required?

Question

I've been using MVC for 2 years and in all this time I never had to use the `.cshtml' extension when referring to views. Now I upgraded to RC2 and started getting "View not found errors". Apart from the pain of adding the extension I now have a lot of code that does not contain the extension.

Is there a way to remove the need for this extension?

PS: I don't know what happened when moving to RC2 but I did not upgrade my project instead created a new one and copied all classes, controllers and views from the old one and fixed the namespaces afterwards.

Answer 1

As Ron C wrote above, its not about ViewResult or PartialViewResult, its about missing the filename extension ".cshtml", when you "viewName" parameter has a relative path value.

That is how the RazorViewEngine (default implementation of IRazorViewEngine) is working in RC2. You can view the code here.

A solution could be to override the View and PartialView methods of a BaseController to automatically append ".cshtml" when needed.

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    [NonAction]
    public override ViewResult View(string viewName, object model)
    {
        return base.View(AppendRazorFileExtensionIfNeeded(viewName), model);
    }

    [NonAction]
    public override PartialViewResult PartialView(string viewName, object model)
    {
        return base.PartialView(AppendRazorFileExtensionIfNeeded(viewName), model);
    }

    private string AppendRazorFileExtensionIfNeeded(string viewName)
    {
        // If viewname is not empty or null
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(viewName))
        {
            // If viewname does have a relative path
            if (viewName[0] == '~' || viewName[0] == '/')
            {
                // If viewname does not have a ".cshtml" extension
                if (!viewName.EndsWith(".cshtml", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                {
                    viewName = string.Concat(viewName, ".cshtml");
                }
            }
        }

        return viewName;
    }
}