Question

In a master-page, how can I know, which controller I am currently using? Is there some kind of context-object, that can give me that sort of information?

Standard menu

<ul>
<li>Fire</li>
<li>Ice</li>
<li>Water</li>
</ul>

Menu if I am in the water-controller

<ul>
<li>Fire</li>
<li>Ice</li>
<li class="selected">Water</li>
</ul>

If I have a menu in my Site.master, where each menu-item refers to a different controller, how can I highlight each menu-item depending on, which controller I am currently in?

I know I can get the url from request.Servervariables and then work some string-magic, but there must be a better way – some kind of context-object?

Answer 1

Here are two helper methods I use for checking if its the current controller or even current action. The you can use the helpers to determine whether to add class=”selected” or not.

public static bool IsCurrentController(this HtmlHelper helper, 
                                       string controllerName)
{
    string currentControllerName = (string)helper.ViewContext.RouteData.
                                   Values["controller"];

    if (currentControllerName.Equals(controllerName,
        StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
    {
       return true;
    }

    return false;
}

public static bool IsCurrentAction(this HtmlHelper helper, string actionName, 
                                   string controllerName)
{
    string currentControllerName = (string)helper.ViewContext.RouteData
                                   .Values["controller"];
    string currentActionName = (string)helper.ViewContext.RouteData
                               .Values["action"];

    if (currentControllerName.Equals(controllerName,
        StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) && 
        currentActionName.Equals(actionName, 
                                 StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase))
    {
        return true;
    }

    return false;
}