Share PartialView between projects in a solution?

Question

I am developing 2 MVC5 websites. They run seperately, but actually related to each other (1 Admin site, and 1 User site). In both site, I have to render a graphical board using HTML table. I am using PartialView with a Model to render it.

Currently, this is my solution structure:

• Project.Common (A class library project, contain the model)

• Project.Admin (MVC5 project for the Admin site), refering to Project.Common.

• Project.User (MVC5 project for User site), refering to Project.Common.

To render the graphical board, I will use BoardData class from Project.Common, which is ok. But with current solution structure, I have to create 2 PartialView in each MVC5 project, which may be hard to maintain later.

Please suggest a good solution for reusing the PartialView. I already know I can write Helper, but that way, I have to write HTML code inside C# code, which is not very good. Is there any way to do this within Razor View?

Answer 1

One of the options you can use is add a link to a file. In this case keep your Partial view in just single project and in second project use Add -> Existing Item, select your partial view from the first project and click on a small down arrow next to the Add button and choose Add as Link. More info can be found on MSDN, see section Add an existing item as a link.

In this case you will have a partial view only in one project and any changes to it will automatically be applied to other project as well.