Create custom view engine using MVC?

Today I will explain how to create our own custom view engine we need to follow three steps:

Let’ say we want to create a custom view engine wherein 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 that implements the 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 that.

    public class MyCustomView : IView

    {

       private string _FolderPath;

       public string FolderPath

    {

        get { return _FolderPath; }

        set { _FolderPath = value; }

    }

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

    {

        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 that 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

    { 

        public MyViewEngineProvider() // constructor

    {

      

            this.ViewLocationFormats = new string[] { "~/Views/{1}/{0}.myview",

              "~/Views/Shared/{0}.myview" };

    }

        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         

            }

        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;

        }

    }

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 global.asax file. Below is the code snippet for that.

protected void Application_Start() { //

 Step4 :- register this object in the view engine collection ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyViewEngineProvider()); ….. }

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

Todays date is <DateTime>

Figure: Custom view engine using MVC

If you invoke this view, you should see the following output: