I needed some code to determine if an ASP.NET MVC view exists. For a particular controller I’m dynamically determining the view to return by name. I looked at the source code for ASP.NET MVC and figured out how views are found and came up with the following code:

public ActionResult Page(string viewName)
{
   ViewEngineResult viewResult = ViewEngines.Engines.FindView(ControllerContext, viewName, null);

   if (viewResult.View == null)
   {
      throw new HttpException(404, "404 - View Not Found");
   }

   return View(viewName);
}

This function is a member of a controller class. I wanted to check if the view exists and return a HTTP 404 result if the view is not found. There is likely a better way to wrap up the call in a helper function, but this illustrates the principle.

There may be another or better way to do this, but this works for now and hopefully might help someone else as well