Feather: Priorities for resolving views

Feather uses a strict convention for resolving the views for widgets. This article describes the different ways to add a view to a widget and what are the priorities for the different approaches.

Following is a list of the different ways to resolve views for widgets. The list is ordered by priority from highest to lower:

• ResourcePackages folder
  Feather provides the ability to base your design on Bootstrap framework. This is achieved by the introduction of resource packages. For more information, see Feather: Resource packages overview.
  To enable packaging of resources, a folder structure in the form of ~/ResourcePackages/[Package Name]/ is introduced in the web application.
  

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

• MVC folder
  After the ResourcePackages folder, Feather searches for your widget template in the MVC folder, located in the SItefinityWebApp project. To match the views with their respective widget, when naming the views, you must follow the naming convention ~/MVC/Views/ContentBlock/[ViewName].[extension]

  The extension of the template file depends on your view engine. For Razor the extension is .cshtml, for WebForms the extension is .aspx.

• Widget templates
  As all Sitefinity CMS widgets, Feather widgets templates can be reused. You can find all the templates by clicking Design » Widget Templates. After the MVC folder, Feather searches for your widget templates in the Widget Templates section.
  

  After you create a new template, you can map it to the widget by opening the widget designer and selecting the template in the dropdown boxes for the list template or the detail template .
  The following image displays how Airport templates for list and detail views are mapped to the Airports custom MVC widget:
  

• Embedded resources
  By design, the MVC controls that come out-of-the-box with Feather, such as Navigation, ContentBlock, or New, have corresponding assemblies that are referenced by the SitefinityWebApp. In each of the assemblies the views have their Build action set to Embedded resource. This way all views are included in the assemblies. This is the final place where Feather searches to resolve the widget view.