Question

I have a bunch of controllers that have the [AllowAnonymous] attribute in class-level scope. I need to check a few things before any of the actions in such controllers executes. For example, I might do something like this:

[AllowAnonymous]
public class MyController : Controller
{
    [HttpGet]
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        // do some preliminary work

        // run action-specific code
    }
}

Because I have many such controllers and actions, copy-pasting the same code is a tedious process. Is there a way to execute this preliminary code for every anonymous action in a much simpler way?

Answer 1

You can create your own action filter.

Make a class that inherits ActionFilterAttribute and overrides OnActionExecuting.
Apply that attribute to a controller or action and it will run before every request to that controller or action.