Scaffolding an external model in ASP.NET MVC 5

Question

I have a simple domain model in an external assembly. This model uses DTOs to communicate with a couple service classes. It does not use Entity Framework.

In Visual Studio 2012 I could select my DTOs in the Add View dialog and scaffold strongly-typed views for them.

However, the DTOs are not showing in the Add View dialog in Visual Studio 2013.

Strongly-typed views I create manually work just fine, so the issue isn't that Razor / MVC can't see or use my DTOs. The issue is just with the scaffolding.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

So your DTO lives somewhere other than the project namespace or the .Models namespace. The dropdown has an affinity to pull classes for strongly typed views from there. I realize that your DTOs might live in another assembly, and what your hack was, but is there a way to recompile them into the MvcDemo.Models namespace in the other assembly and declare a partial class in the models namespace in the MVC project? That may not be the ideal answer, and if you don't like the idea, I'll gladly delete my answer.