Priorities for resolving MVC widgets views

Feather uses a strict convention for resolving the views for widgets. In this article you will learn what are the different ways to add a view to widget and what are the priorities for the different ways.

The following list shows ways to resolve views for widgets with priority from highest to lower:

1.ResourcePackages folder

Feather provides the ability to base your design on one of the most popular Css/Front-end frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, SemanticUI, etc. This is achieved by the introduction of resource packages. The following structure is introduced in the web application to enable packaging of resources:

~/ResourcePackages/[Package Name]/

You can have several packages with different package names. A page template can use one package. For more information on Feather page templates, see Page templates based on layout files with Feather.

2.MVC folder

The second place where Feather will search for your widget template is the MVC folder in the SItefinityWebApp project. Here you must again follow a convention so that Feather knows which view goes to which control:

~/MVC/Views/ContentBlock/[ViewName].[extension]

The extension of the template file depends on your view engine – for Razor the valid extension is cshtml, for WebForms the extension is aspx, and so on. See this article for basic overview of different view engines.

3.Widget templates

As all Sitefinity widgets, Feather widgets templates could be reused via the Design -> Widget Templates. This is the third place by priority that is looked when resolving a view from Feather. See Widget templates section in Sitefinity documentation for more details.

After a new template is created, you can further map it to the control by opening the designer of thw widget and selecting the name of the template from the List template/ Detail template dropdowns.

The following image displays how Airport templates for List and Detail views are mapped to the Airports custom MVC widget:

4.Embedded resources

By design the MVC controls that come out-of-the-box when installing Feather - Navigation, ContentBlock, News etc. are having corresponding assemblies that are referenced by the SitefinityWebApp. In each of the assemblies the views are marked with Build action="Embedded resource" so that all views are included in the assemblies. If you haven't customized the view of the widget by any of the ways described in the previous steps, this is the final place where Feather will search to resolve the widget view.