MVC ASP.NET interview question: -Can we create our custom view engine using MVC?

Yes, we can create our own custom view engine in MVC. To create our own custom view engine we need to follow 3 steps:-

Let’ say we want to create a custom view engine where in the user can type a command like “<DateTime>” and it should display the current date and time.

Step 1 :- We need to create a class which implements “IView” interface. In this class we should write the logic of how the view will be rendered in the “render” function. Below is a simple code snippet for the same.

public class MyCustomView : IView

{

private string _FolderPath; // Define where our views are stored

public string FolderPath

{

get { return _FolderPath; }

set { _FolderPath = value; }

}

public void Render(ViewContext viewContext, System.IO.TextWriter writer)

{

// Parsing logic <dateTime>

// read the view file

string strFileData = File.ReadAllText(_FolderPath);

// we need to and replace <datetime> datetime.now value

string strFinal = strFileData.Replace("<DateTime>", DateTime.Now.ToString());

// this replaced data has to sent for display

writer.Write(strFinal);

}

Step 2 :- We need to create a class which inherits from “ VirtualPathProviderViewEngine” and in this class we need to provide the folder path and the extension of the view name. For instance for razor the extension is “cshtml” , for aspx the view extension is “.aspx” , so in the same way for our custom view we need to provide an extension. Below is how the code looks like. You can see the “ViewLocationFormats” is set to the “Views” folder and the extension is “.myview”.

public class MyViewEngineProvider : VirtualPathProviderViewEngine

{

// We will create the object of Mycustome view

public MyViewEngineProvider() // constructor

{

// Define the location of the View file

this.ViewLocationFormats = new string[] { "~/Views/{1}/{0}.myview", "~/Views/Shared/{0}.myview" }; //location and extension of our views

}

protected override IView CreateView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewPath, string masterPath)

{

var physicalpath = controllerContext.HttpContext.Server.MapPath(viewPath);

MyCustomView obj = new MyCustomView(); // Custom view engine class

obj.FolderPath = physicalpath; // set the path where the views will be stored

return obj; // returned this view paresing logic so that it can be registered in the view engine collection

}

protected override IView CreatePartialView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string partialPath)

{

var physicalpath = controllerContext.HttpContext.Server.MapPath(partialPath);

MyCustomView obj = new MyCustomView(); // Custom view engine class

obj.FolderPath = physicalpath; // set the path where the views will be stored

return obj; // returned this view paresing logic so that it can be registered in the view engine collection

}

Step 3:- We need to register the view in the custom view collection. The best place to register the custom view engine in the “ViewEngines” collection is the “global.asax” file. Below is the code snippet for the same.

Below is a simple output of the custom view written using the commands defined at the top.