Question

I have a controller decorated with an AuthorizeAttribute. The controller contains several actions that all require authentication apart from one action that requires some custom authentication provided by CustomAuthorizeAttribute.

My question is once I’ve added [Authorize] at the controller level can I override it (or remove it) with [CustomAuthorize] on just one action? Or do I have to remove [Authorize] from the controller level and add it individually to every other action?

I’m asking purely for convenience because I’m lazy and don’t want to decorate every action with the AuthorizeAttribute.

[Authorize]
public class MyController : Controller {

  //requires authentication
  public ViewResult Admin() {
    return View();
  }

  //... a lot more actions requiring authentication

  //requires custom authentication
  [CustomAuthorize]  //never invoked as already failed at controller level
  public ViewResult Home() {
    return View();
  }

}

Answer 1

You can change the Order in which the attributes run (using the Order property), but I believe that in this case they will still both run unless one generates a result with immediate effect. The key is to have the least restrictive attribute applied at the highest level (class) and get more restrictive for the methods. If you wanted the Home action to be publicly available, for instance, you would need to remove the Authorize attribute from the class, and apply it to each of the other methods.

If the action has the same level of permissiveness, but has a different result, changing the order may be sufficient. For example, you would normally redirect to the Logon action, but for Home you want to redirect to the About action. In this, case give the class attribute Order=2 and the Home action attribute Order=1.