MVC Partial Views in a Custom Directory

If you stop the debugger in a MVC controller and have a dig down in ViewEngines.Engines you will find a property PartialViewLocationFormats

When using @Html.Partial(“{_YourView}”)  razors view engine looks in the 4 default locations. The {0} represents the view name and {1} is the controller name.

If you move your partials to a different directory you will get an error screen as it can’t find the file on the default paths its loading. To work around this you can set your own custom ViewEngine with the the paths to your specific location. So for example if you were storing the partials in /Partials then you would use:

public class MyViewEngine : RazorViewEngine 

    {

        private static readonly string[] NewPartialViewFormats = new[]

                                                                     {

                                                                          "~/Views/Shared/Partials/{0}.cshtml",

                                                                     };

        public MyViewEngine()

        {

            base.PartialViewLocationFormats = base.PartialViewLocationFormats.Union(NewPartialViewFormats).ToArray();

        }

    }

And then in the global.asax.cs you would call it at startup:

protected void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e)
        {            
            ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new MyViewEngine());
        }