New MVC 3 area registration

I'm attempting to follow the same architecture as the administration area (Nop.Admin) to create my own area specific to my website but it doesn't work. I know my AreaRegistration class is being called because the url I mapped works after the application has started but during run-time my default view is trying to use the Nop.Web.Controllers.HomeController controller instead of the one I've specified which is Backoffice.Controllers.HomeController. Is there something special to nopCommerce that I need to do to get my area to register properly? This is nopCommerce 2.3.

Here's my registration class:

namespace Backoffice
{
    public class BackofficeRegistration : AreaRegistration
    {
        public override string AreaName
        {
            get { return "Backoffice"; }
        }

        public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
        {
            context.MapRoute(
                "Backoffice_default",
                "Backoffice/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional, area = AreaName },
                new[] { "Backoffice.Controllers" }
            );
        }
    }
}

Ok, hunted this down finally. I needed to add my custom area to these files so that nopcommerce knows to look for my area in a specific folder:

Nop.Web.Framework\Themes\ThemableRazorViewEngine.cs
Nop.Web.Framework\Themes\ThemeableVirtualPathProviderViewEngine.cs

Big thanks to RouteDebugger for helping me visually see what routes were matching.
http://haacked.com/archive/2011/04/13/routedebugger-2.aspx

I still have another issue where http://mysite/backoffice throws a 403.14 in IIS and i have to call it like this http://mysite/backoffice/home in order for anything to pop up. Hunting down this issue next..

All kinds of caveats when trying to do a custom area. The last remaining issue was due to the fact that my route url "Backoffice" was the same as the physical folder on the drive. So when browsing http://mysite/backoffice IIS thought I wanted to browse the folder contents and that was causing the 403.14 errors. I renamed my folder to something else, updated the various hard-coded view engine files and now everything works just fine.

I am going to follow your post but I think MVC dropped the ball on this one.  Currently, I am building a site that the customer wanted Content Management for, a shopping cart component, and a Blog section.  After trying to get the three applications to "play" together including areas, I finally resorted to creating 3 sites www.mysite.com, donate.mysite.com, and blogs.mysite.com.

IMO, creating a area in order to incorporate another website should be as simple as creating a folder and placing your web app in there.  I ran out of time trying to get areas to work.  I'll have to try your approach.  There are advantages to my approach.  The disadvantages are: needing 3 static ips and possibly 3 site certificates, Skinning 3 different sites to look like one another, creating a universal login for all three.

You can actually just right click the Nop.Web project and choose Add -> Area. This will create an named isolated area for you under a special Area folder and this should work out-of-box with nopCommerce according to the code in their custom view engine (haven’t verified this myself yet). However doing it this way the code is not in a separate .net project/assembly which is what I wanted to continue the existing architecture already present (Nop.Admin) and also have the option of re-usability and easier updates to the code base.

For you current setup you can assign the Host Headers/Names under “Bindings” in IIS7.5 for each of the three sites and still only have one IP. I don’t know squat about certificates; yet. Stackoverflow.com is probably the best place to ask/find out more.

To paint a better picture of doing it as a separate project this was the basic folder setup: (note: your physical folder cannot be the same as your url route or you'll get 403.14 errors)

Nop.Web
  Administration (Nop.Admin project files are under here)
  App_Data
  bin
  Content
  Controllers
  CustomerBackoffice (Backoffice project files are under here)
    Views
      Shared
        _Layout.cshtml (make sure you change code in this file to match the physical folder name)
      _ViewStart.cshtml (make sure you change code in this file to match the physical folder name)
  ...

ThemeableVirtualPathProviderViewEngine.cs

//little hack to get nop's admin area to be in /Administration/ instead of /Nop/Admin/ or Areas/Admin/
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(areaName) && areaName.Equals("admin", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
{
  var newLocations = areaLocations.ToList();
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml");
  areaLocations = newLocations.ToArray();
}
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(areaName) && areaName.Equals("backoffice", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
{
  var newLocations = areaLocations.ToList();
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml");
  newLocations.Insert(0, "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml");
  areaLocations = newLocations.Concat(areaLocations).ToArray();
}

ThemableRazorViewEngine.cs

ViewLocationFormats = new[]
              {
                //themes
                "~/Themes/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml", 
                "~/Themes/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", 
                "~/Themes/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/Themes/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",

                //default
                "~/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml", 
                "~/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", 
                "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",


                //Admin
                "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",
                "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",

                //CustomerBackoffice
                "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",
                "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml"
              };

PartialViewLocationFormats = new[]
                 {
                   //themes
                  "~/Themes/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml", 
                  "~/Themes/{2}/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", 
                  "~/Themes/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml", 
                  "~/Themes/{2}/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",

                  //default
                  "~/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml", 
                  "~/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml", 
                  "~/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml", 
                  "~/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",

                  //Admin
                  "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
                  "~/Administration/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",
                  "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                  "~/Administration/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml",

                  //CustomerBackoffice
                  "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
                  "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/{1}/{0}.vbhtml",
                  "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
                  "~/CustomerBackoffice/Views/Shared/{0}.vbhtml"
                 };