MVCSiteMapProvider won't use Razor Templates for Menu

Question

I'm enjoying using the well-made MVCSiteMapProvider through Nuget at the moment but I've hit a roadblock.

I'm trying to modify the template for the @Html.MvcSiteMap().Menu() helper. The file I'm modifying is ..\Views\Shared\DisplayTemplates\MenuHelperModel.cshtml and no matter what change I make to the file, the template does not update when rendered.

I've done a Find All with notepad++ and found that within MvcSiteMapProvider.dll there is two templates, one for classic asp.net and one for Razor. So clearly the template within the .dll file is being called - but how do I make this not the case?

It may be worth knowing that although the templates are located in ..\Views\Shared\DisplayTemplates\, the site is configured to use a different folder for Views.

edit: also if I pass in a template name to the helper, still no effect.

Answer 1

Templated helpers are an MVC creation, not one of MvcSiteMapProvider. I strongly suspect your issue is due to reconfiguring your Views folder. MVC does not support a way to reconfigure your templates folder.

But as pointed out in the accepted answer, it is possible to put them under ~/Views/CurrentController/DisplayTemplates/. You might be able to use that feature to put the templates in your newly configured folders. This means that you would need to add a copy of the templates for every single controller, though.

The best solution is not to change the MVC folders from their defaults.

If that is not an option, you might consider rolling your own Menu HTML helper based on the code from the current one that returns an HtmlString rather than using templates.

The templated helpers are better because you can edit the code after it is deployed (which is why we did it that way), but it comes with the caveat that you have to rely on MVC's default folder structure to use them.