Orchard CMS Render module view in homepage - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I'm trying to render a view, defined in a module, in the main site homepage (~/) as it's main content. If the user is not authenticated, i need to show a login/register view instead.
The logged-in view lives in one module (Product Module) and the login/register view lives in another (Account Module). The logged-in view requires a service call to fetch data based on the user's products. I'm currently using standard mvc to render these views and fetch the data they require in their controllers.
Can this be accomplished by treating these views as shape templates? If so, are there any examples of pulling in views to the homepage like this? Or is there a better way of achieving this?
I have tried implmenting IHomePageProvider to return my own homepage ViewResult within the Product module, but without any success.
Cheers.

Answer 1

First, you might want to look into widgets and layers. You could define a layer for authenticaed users, and one for anonymous users, and attach widgets to those layers to achieve what you want. That might be the best way for you to accomplish this. Look in the Orchard docs for examples on how to do this.
I have done a similar thing before using custom controller and a lot of custom logic. Because of my specific requirements widgets and layers would not work for this. All the content on the page needed to change depending on some inputs, and widgets and layers were not going to be well suited for this. What I did was create a custom controller, and a corresponding Route with a high priority (so the Route takes precedence over any others that want to be the home page). I didn't mess with IHomePageProvider at all.
In the controller action I pulled the data necessary, and created the shapes I wanted, and then returned a result like this: return new ShapeResult(this, homePageShape);
homePageShape is constructed like this, right before the return statement:
// Create personalized home page shape:
var homeShape = _orchardServices.New.CustomHome(
SomeShape1: someShape1
, SomeShape2: someShape2
, SomeModel1: someModel1
...
);
This creates a shape called CustomHome, and orchard will automatically look for a template called CustomHome.cshtml in the views folder of your module.
I created several shapes (all the "someShapeX" vars you see above). Mostly they are created from content parts via the BuildDisplay() method. The content parts are queried using IContentManager, and the shapes are created like this (this example is for a slide show shape):
dynamic sliderShape = _contentManager.BuildDisplay(sliderPart, "Detail");
You can put logic in the controller to build the shapes you want depending on whether or not the user is logged in. In CustomHome.cshtml you would render a shape like this:
#Display(Model.SomeShape1)