Question

I am creating an MVC Intranet app with windows authentication. The data being accessed is year specific, so I need a way to set a global variable, be it a session, or whatever, that must be set before any queries are performed.

I’ve not been able to find a way to force a user to login since they are already authorized via their windows login credentials so using attributes to force a login seems problematic.

I am finding that users could navigate to any particular page and attempt to pull data and create a bit of havoc without the year defined.

What I would like to do is force a user to a year select page to select the year which they wish to access if the year variable is not yet set.

I’ve checked related questions and they do not appear to provide answer to my current conundrum.

Answer 1

You can write a custom ActionFilter, which you put on all your controllers (but not on the action where you have to select the year, of course). If year ain’t be selected, you redirect to the controller/action where you can choose the year.

public class CheckYearAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        if(<YEAR IS NOT SET>)//redirect
        {
            filterContext.Result = new RedirectToRouteResult(
                new RouteValueDictionary {{ "Controller", "YourController" },
                                      { "Action", "YourAction" } });
        }

        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}