Question

I would like my MVC application to check (on every request) if the current user has a profile. If no profile is found, I want to redirect them to the “profile” page for them to submit one.

    protected void Application_AuthenticateRequest()
    {
        if (HttpContext.Current.User != null)
        {
            // Redirect to profile page if the current user does not have a profile
            if (!HttpContext.Current.User.HasProfile())
                Response.RedirectToRoute("Profile");
        }
    }

I have extended the IPrincipal to include a method “User.HasProfile()” to check if the user has a profile. It works, but the problem is the that Application_AuthenticateRequest gets called for every single request, including javascript, css etc…

Moreover, it creates a redirect loop when I try to do Response.RedirectToRoute(“Profile”).

The only way I have found around this is to add the following to my IF statement before redirecting to the profile page:

!HttpContext.Current.User.HasProfile() && Request.Path != "/system/profile" && !Request.Path.Contains(".")

It checks if the current path is not the profile page (to prevent the redirect loop) and if there is a period in the URL (to allow javascript and css resources to continue to load). Is there a better way? How do you guys handle this?

Answer 1

I’m not sure if this will work for every single case, but I found that you can interrogate the Handler property of the current context, and it’s null for static resources.

void LogRequestInfo(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

        HttpApplication app = (HttpApplication)sender;
        HttpContext ctx = app.Context;

        // We don't want to spend resources logging static file requests.  This code was added when we moved
        // to Integrated mode in IIS.
        if (ctx.Handler == null)
            return;

// More code below here...

}