Replace MVC Application Part and Razor File Providers in runtime

Question

I have a WebAPI/MVC app which loads separate plugin assemblies with embedded controllers and views and puts them into the MVC PartManager. This works fine but now I'd like to be able to swap these parts out in runtime without restarting the server. I can use PartManager.Remove on the old part and Add with a new part, but this does not seem to be enough. When calling the controller I still get a response from the old controller in the old part.

Apart from adding parts in the PartManager I also add a EmbeddedFileProvider into the RazorViewEngineOptions on Configure because just adding an AssemblyPart does not seem to be enough for the Razor engine to find the view (not sure I'm doing this right). But I don't know if I can replace this Razor-fileprovider in runtime? I have not found a way.

Anyway, what is the preferred way of doing all this, I mean loading/replacing dlls with controllers, views and static resources. Am I on the right track even?

Answer 1

i think that Razor view engines are configured once only, so you cannot change them later.

What you can do is to

• have multiple view engines running,
• choose between them based on the URL (as in your case - you want to use a different engine for the one controller).

This is described in CUSTOMMOBILEVIEWENGINE section of Scott Hanselsman's blog post. What he was doing was to use different view engines for different devices, but you can adapt the technique for your own purposes.