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258 Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner’s Guide
Organizing View Files
The file structure in Figure 9-2 shows that Views appear in the Views folder and have a
*.aspx file extension. Each subfolder under the Views folder corresponds to a Controller,
and the Views within the subfolder correspond generally to Controller actions. When
a Controller passes control to a View, by calling View, ASP.NET MVC searches for the
View in the Views folder with the subfolder named the same as the Controller and the file
named the same as the action calling the View.
Notice that there is a Shared folder. Sometimes, you’ll want to have a View that is
shared by two or more Controller actions, and you can put these shared V
iews in the
Shared subfolder. Whenever ASP.NET MVC doesn’t find a View in the Controller-named
subfolder, it will search for the View in the Shared folder. An important file in the Shared
subfolder is the MasterPage, which is discussed next.
Assigning MasterPage Files
Most sites on the Web have multiple pages, each with common elements. They all have the
same header, menu, sidebars, and footers. When you first build a site, you can duplicate
this common content with no trouble, but this copy-and-paste type duplication will cause
a lot of headaches in the future. The first time you have to change the common elements,
you’ll need to visit every page. If the site has only a few pages, no problem, but the reality
is that most sites of any success grow to dozens or hundreds of pages. It is beyond practical
to try to update every page on a site every time the common content changes.
This is where MasterPages help, allowing you to specify the common content in one
place where you can have content pages that use the MasterPage. Whenever something
changes in the common content, you update the MasterPage, and every page of a site that
uses the MasterPage is automatically updated. Listing 9-3 shows the MasterPage, created
by ASP.NET MVC, that the content page in Listing 9-2 uses.
Listing 9-3 A MasterPage
<%@ Master Language="C#"
Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewMasterPage" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">