Question

Is there any way to gain access to the controller that is currently executing from within Global.asax?

I’d like to design an API with similar syntax to:

MyClass.RegisterComponents().When(IController => /* Some condition */)

Although I could move this code to a place where the controller is in context, I’d like to keep it centralised and portable.

So far, I have been unable to obtain the controller. Any ideas?

I have considered creating a base controller and extending all of my controllers from this base class, however, I’d like to make this library portable with the ability to be installed via NuGet. For this reason I am unable to take this approach.

Answer 1

I found a solution to this. Not a very good one but it solves my problem.

Register a global IActionFilter using an assembly start up method I found on David Ebbo’s blog (http://blog.davidebbo.com/2011/02/register-your-http-modules-at-runtime.html).

The global action filter simply stores the action context in the current HttpContext.Items[] collection which is a per request collection.

public class GlobalActionFilter : System.Web.Mvc.IActionFilter {

        internal static readonly object ActionExecutedFilterKey =
            "__MvcResourceLoaderActionExecutedContext";

        internal static readonly object ActionExecutingFilterKey =
            "__MvcResourceLoaderActionExecutingContext";

        static MvcResourceLoaderGlobalFilter __instance =
            new MvcResourceLoaderGlobalFilter();

        MvcResourceLoaderGlobalFilter() { }

        public void OnActionExecuted(System.Web.Mvc.ActionExecutedContext filterContext) {
            System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Items[ActionExecutedFilterKey] =
                filterContext;
        }

        public void OnActionExecuting(System.Web.Mvc.ActionExecutingContext filterContext) {
            System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Items[ActionExecutingFilterKey] =
                filterContext;
        }

        public static void RegisterGlobalFilter() {

            if (!System.Web.Mvc.GlobalFilters.Filters.Contains(__instance))
                System.Web.Mvc.GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(__instance);
        }
    }

I can then access the context anywhere.