Using Shared Layouts with Razor Pages

Most websites have more than one page. If every page had to contain all of the current boilerplate markup in index.cshtml, that would become a pain to manage. So, ASP.NET Core has a feature named layouts.

Method to use layouts

To use layouts, we must create a Razor file to define the default layout for all Razor Pages (and all MVC views) and store it in a Shared folder to easily find it by convention. The name of this file can be anything because we will specify it, but _Layout.cshtml is good practice. We must also create a specially named file to set the default layout file for all Razor Pages (and all MVC views). This file must be named _ViewStart.cshtml.

Layouts in action

Let’s see layouts in action:

Step 1: In the Pages folder, add a file named _ViewStart.cshtml. (The Visual Studio item template is named Razor View Start.)

Step 2: If you are using Visual Studio Code, modify the _ViewStart.cshtml file content, as shown in the following markup: