The view or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations

Question

Error like:The view 'LoginRegister' or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations. The following locations were searched:

~/Views/MyAccount/LoginRegister.aspx

~/Views/MyAccount/LoginRegister.ascx

~/Views/Shared/LoginRegister.aspx

~/Views/Shared/LoginRegister.ascx

~/Views/MyAccount/LoginRegister.cshtml

~/Views/MyAccount/LoginRegister.vbhtml

~/Views/Shared/LoginRegister.cshtml

~/Views/Shared/LoginRegister.vbhtml

Actually my page view page is ~/Views/home/LoginRegister.cshtml so what i do

and my RouteConfig is

 public class RouteConfig
    {

        public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

            routes.MapRoute(
                name: "Default",
                url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
                defaults: new { controller = "MyAccount", action = "LoginRegister", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
            );
        }
    }

Move the LoginResiter view into the correct folder (for the MyAccount controller). — Mansfield, Aug 16 '13 at 12:33
ASP.NET MVC expects views for a specific controller to be in either the shared folder, or a folder with the name of the controller. As you can see, it's looking in the "MyAccount" folder, and the "Shared" folder. If you want to use a view in a controller, you should place it in the folder with that controller name. It has nothing to do with your route configuration. — Mansfield, Aug 16 '13 at 12:36
I received this error after publishing a site to another computer. It turned out the Build action on the view was set to `None` instead of `Content` so switching those and republishing (or just copying the file ) worked. — Patrick, Jun 22 '14 at 12:52
possible duplicate of [The view 'Index' or its master was not found.](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2269220/the-view-index-or-its-master-was-not-found) — Elshan, Sep 17 '15 at 09:00
If you're sure the view is where it's supposed to be, you can try rebuilding with the "optimizeCompilations" web.config key set to false. — Taraz, Dec 14 '21 at 18:42

score 125 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 04 '22 at 11:30

125

Be careful if your model type is String because the second parameter of View(string, string) is masterName, not model. You may need to call the overload with object(model) as the second parameter:

Not correct :

protected ActionResult ShowMessageResult(string msg)
{
    return View("Message",msg);
}

Correct :

protected ActionResult ShowMessageResult(string msg)
{
    return View("Message",(object)msg);
}

OR (provided by bradlis7):

protected ActionResult ShowMessageResult(string msg)
{
    return View("Message",model:msg);
}

edited Mar 04 '22 at 11:30

Bridge

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answered Jul 06 '15 at 12:18

Nigrimmist

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Instead of casting `(object)msg`, specify the argument explicitly: `return View("Message", model: msg);` – bradlis7 Nov 16 '16 at 18:14
1

This is a great answer – JsonStatham Jun 27 '18 at 07:36
1

The part `Be careful if your model type is String because the second parameter of View(string, string) is masterName, not model.` just f*** saved me! THANKS!! In 10 seconds you solved a problem that was driving me crazy for half an hour! – Vitox Feb 23 '23 at 09:24

score 32 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 16 '13 at 12:34

32

Problem:

Your View cannot be found in default locations.

Explanation:

Views should be in the same folder named as the Controller or in the Shared folder.

Solution:

Either move your View to the MyAccount folder or create a HomeController.

Alternatives:

If you don't want to move your View or create a new Controller you can check at this link.

answered Aug 16 '13 at 12:34

glautrou

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Additionally if you are having this issue I have found, it is best to just delete your view. (copy its contents to notepadd++) Go to your controller and then right click on your actionresult and select generate view then you can see where your controller was looking for your view and place your views accordingly. – Bill Blankenship Mar 21 '14 at 14:39

score 14 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 16 '13 at 13:13

In Microsoft ASP.net MVC, the routing engine, which is used to parse incoming and outgoing URL Combinations, is designed with the idea of Convention over Configuration. What this means is that if you follow the Convention (rules) that the routing engine uses, you don't have to change the Configuration.

The routing engine for ASP.net MVC does not serve web pages (.cshtml). It provides a way for a URL to be handled by a Class in your code, which can render text/html to the output stream, or parse and serve the .cshtml files in a consistent manner using Convention.

The Convention which is used for routing is to match a Controller to a Class with a name similar to ControllerNameController i.e. controller="MyAccount" means find class named MyAccountController. Next comes the action, which is mapped to a function within the Controller Class, which usually returns an ActionResult. i.e. action="LoginRegister" will look for a function public ActionResult LoginRegister(){} in the controller's class. This function may return a View() which would be by Convention named LoginRegister.cshtml and would be stored in the /Views/MyAccount/ folder.

To summarize, you would have the following code:

/Controllers/MyAccountController.cs:

public class MyAccountController : Controller 
{
    public ActionResult LoginRegister()
    {
        return View();
    }
}

/Views/MyAccount/LoginRegister.cshtml: Your view file.

score 11 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 21 '15 at 18:10

11

In your LoginRegister action when returning the view, do below, i know this can be done in mvc 5, im not sure if in mvc 4 also.

 public ActionResult Index()
 {
     return View("~/Views/home/LoginRegister.cshtml");
 }

answered Aug 21 '15 at 18:10

dansasu11

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score 6 · Answer 5 · answered May 07 '17 at 17:23

6

Check the build action of your view (.cshtml file) It should be set to content. In some cases, I have seen that the build action was set to None (by mistake) and this particular view was not deploy on the target machine even though you see that view present in visual studio project file under valid folder

answered May 07 '17 at 17:23

Kapil

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In my case, it was related to "Build Action" property as well, but I needed to set it to "Embedded Resource" – Ali Tahouri Jan 02 '19 at 03:03
Bless you, this was it for me. – blackorchid Nov 13 '22 at 16:32

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Aug 21 '15 at 17:46

3

This could be a permissions issue.

I had the same issue recently. As a test, I created a simple hello.html page. When I tried loading it, I got an error message regarding permissions. Once I fixed the permissions issue in the root web folder, both the html page and the MVC rendering issues were resolved.

answered Aug 21 '15 at 17:46

lipidfish

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In my case also it was permissions issue, allowed authenticated users access on the root folder of application and removing readonly flag fixed the issue – Momin Jan 08 '18 at 10:51

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Jul 22 '15 at 07:58

Check whether the View (.ASPX File) that you have created is having the same name as mentioned in the Controller. For e.g:

 public ActionResult GetView()
 {
    return View("MyView");
 }

In this case, the aspx file should be having the name MyView.aspx instead of GetView.aspx

Saeed Mousavi · Answer 8 · 2016-07-15T16:15:26.080

2

I got this error because I renamed my View (and POST action).

Finally I found that I forgot to rename BOTH GET and POST actions to new name.

Solution : Rename both GET and POST actions to match the View name.

edited Jul 15 '16 at 16:15

answered Feb 16 '16 at 21:25

Saeed Mousavi

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score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Feb 10 '17 at 20:25

If the problem happens intermittently in production, it could be due to an action method getting interrupted. For example, during a POST operation involving a large file upload, the user closes the browser window before the upload completes. In this case, the action method may throw a null reference exception resulting from a null model or view object. A solution would be to wrap the method body in a try/catch and return null. Like this:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Post(...)
{
    try
    {
        ...
    }
    catch (NullReferenceException ex)  // could happen if POST is interrupted
    {
        // perhaps log a warning here
        return null;
    }

    return View(model);
}

Chris Catignani · Answer 10 · 2019-04-06T00:05:35.493

I had this same issue. I had copied a view "Movie" and renamed it "Customer" accordingly. I also did the same with the models and the controllers.

The resolution was this...I rename the Customer View to Customer1 and just created a new view and called it Customer....I then just copied the Customer1 code into Customer.

This worked.

I would love to know the real cause of the problem.

UPDATE Just for grins....I went back and replicated all the renaming scenario again...and did not get any errors.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Mar 12 '20 at 19:54

I came across this error due to the improper closing of the statement,

@using (Html.BeginForm("DeleteSelected", "Employee", FormMethod.Post))

{

} //This curly bracket needed to be closed at the end.

In Index.cshtml view file.I didn't close the statement at the end of the program. instead, I ended up closing improperly and ran into this error.

I was sure there isn't a need of checking Controller ActionMethod code because I have returned the Controller method properly to the View. So It has to be the view that's not responding and met with similar Error.

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Oct 12 '15 at 10:38

0

If you've checked all the things from the above answers (which are common mistakes) and you're sure that your view is at the location in the exceptions, then you may need to restart Visual Studio.

:(

answered Oct 12 '15 at 10:38

JDandChips

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score 0 · Answer 13 · answered Aug 19 '19 at 13:01

In my case, I needed to use RedirectToAction to solve the problem.

[HttpGet]
[ControleDeAcessoAuthorize("Report/ExportToPDF")]
public ActionResult ExportToPDF(int id, string month, string output)
{
    try
    {
        // Validate
        if (output != "PDF")
        {
            throw new Exception("Invalid output.");
        }
        else
        {
            ...// code to generate report in PDF format
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        return RedirectToAction("Error");
    }
}

[ControleDeAcessoAuthorize("Report/Error")]
public ActionResult Error()
{
    return View();
}

score 0 · Answer 14 · answered Aug 27 '19 at 11:23

I ran into this a while ago and it drove me crazy because it turned out to be simple. So within my View I was using a grid control that obtained data for the grid via an http request. Once the middle tier completed my request and returned the dataset, I received the same error. Turns out my return statement was 'return View(dataset);' instead of 'return Json(dataset);

score 0 · Answer 15 · answered Dec 15 '20 at 13:41

I couldn't find any solution to this problem, until I found out the files didn't exist! This took me a long time to figure out, because the Solution Explorer shows the files!

But when I click on Index.cshtml I get this error:

So that was the reason for this error to show. I hope this answer helps somebody.

The view or its master was not found or no view engine supports the searched locations

15 Answers15

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