MVC Display Files from a Folder in a View

Question

What I'm looking to do, is display the contents of a folder which is located on my server in a View in my MVC application.

I have what I think should be in place for the Action, however I'm a little unsure how to go about implementing the corresponding view and I was wondering if someone could point be in the right direction on that. (and also, if someone thinks my Action could be improved, advice would be welcome :) )

Here is the action:

public ActionResult Index()
        {
            DirectoryInfo salesFTPDirectory = null;
            FileInfo[] files = null;

            try
            {
                string salesFTPPath = "E:/ftproot/sales";
                salesFTPDirectory = new DirectoryInfo(salesFTPPath);
                files = salesFTPDirectory.GetFiles();
            }
            catch (DirectoryNotFoundException exp)
            {
                throw new FTPSalesFileProcessingException("Could not open the ftp directory", exp);
            }
            catch (IOException exp)
            {
                throw new FTPSalesFileProcessingException("Failed to access directory", exp);
            }

            files = files.OrderBy(f => f.Name).ToArray();

            var salesFiles = files.Where(f => f.Extension == ".xls" || f.Extension == ".xml");

            return View(salesFiles);
        }

Any help would be appreciated, thanks :)

Answer 1

If you only want the file names then you can change your Linq query to

files = files.Where(f => f.Extension == ".xls" || f.Extension == ".xml")
  .OrderBy(f => f.Name)
  .Select(f => f.Name)
  .ToArray();
return View(files);

Then (assuming the default project template) add the following to the Index.cshtml view

<ul>
  @foreach (var name in Model) {
    <li>@name</li>
  }
</ul>

Which will display the list of file names

Answer 2

1. IMHO you should expose only what is really needed by the view. Think about it: do you really need to retrieve a whole FileInfo object, or only a file path? If the latter is true, just return a IEnumerable<string> to the view (instead of a IEnumerable<FileInfo>, which is what you're doing in the above code). Hint: just add a Select call to your Linq expression...
2. Then your view will just render that model - what you need is a foreach loop and some HTML code to do it.

Answer 3

This is a simplified example of a razor view. It will ouput your file names in a HTML table.

  @model IEnumerable<FileInfo>

    <h1>Files</h1>
    <table>

    @foreach (var item in Model) {
        <tr>
            <td>
                @item.Name
            </td>
        </tr>
    }

    </table>