Question

I’m currently about two-and-a-half weeks in to my first ASP.Net MVC application, and so far, I love it.

This current project is a port of an ASP.Net WebForms project, and I am trying to maintain functionalty. All is going well.

However, I find myself repeating… myself.

For example, In my BaseController class, in my BaseViewPage, in my BaseViewUserControl, AND in my BaseViewMasterPage, I have the following code:

protected LanLordzApplicationManager AppManager
{
    get
    {
        if(Session["Application"] == null)
        {
            Session["Application"] = new LanLordzApplicationManager(Server.MapPath("~/"));
        }

        return (LanLordzApplicationManager)Session["Application"];
    }
}

protected User CurrentUser
{
    get
    {
        if (Session["UserID"] == null && this.Request.Cookies["AutoLogOnKey"] != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Request.Cookies["AutoLogOnKey"].Value))
        {
            this.CurrentUser = this.AppManager.RecallUser(this.Request.Cookies["AutoLogOnKey"].Value, Request.UserHostAddress);
        }

        if (Session["UserID"] == null)
        {
            return null;
        }
        else
        {
            return this.AppManager.GetUserByUserID((long)Session["UserID"]);
        }
    }
    set
    {
        Session["UserID"] = value.UserID;
    }
}

Now, this is not beautiful code. I would like to fix it up a little bit, but as of right now, I’m fixing it in four places. It has been, in fact, the source of a couple of bugs, which meant fixing it in all four places again.

How would you suggest I keep this system DRY? Note that both of these objects must be kept on the session for more than a couple of reasons.

Answer 1

You could remove the code from BaseViewPage, BaseViewUserControl and BaseViewMasterPage. All data used in rendering the views can be passed to them from the controller as viewdata which is already available in all the views. This centralizes your code at least to the controller base class.