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Asked: 2026-05-20T07:19:09+00:00

My Problem: I have an MVC3 application where all views use a common master

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My Problem: I have an MVC3 application where all views use a common master page. The master page has many links to other (internal) sites. I need to be able to change the domain of these links depending on the deployment environment (e.g. staging.blah.com, http://www.blah.com, dev.blah.com etc). This domain is stored in the web.config.

There are numerous ways of doing this, but I am looking for some sort of consensus as to the preferred method. Here are some options but I am open to any suggestions:

(1) reference appsettings from master page directly. This is the simplest and most common approach but I am not particularly keen on reading the web.config and concatenate the url throughout the master page code. In fact, I am not sure that I like the idea of the view accessing the web.config at all.

(2) stick the appsetting value in viewdata/viewbag using a custom action filter which reads the config. concatenate in the page as before.

(3) as (2), but inject appsetting value in via contructor injection rather than reading it within the filter.

(4) create a base class for all my strongly typed viewmodels and populate with the appsetting using a custom action filter.

(5) create an htmlhelper that takes in the path and internally reads the appsetting and concatenates.

(6) create a custom view base class, inject in appsetting value and make available as property or function that takes in path and concatenates.

Just to add that typically when the master page requires data, I like to use Html.Action, but this is not possible in the case of these URLs that are used throughout the master page.

Thoughts?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    (5) create an htmlhelper that takes in the path and internally reads the appsetting and concatenates.

    I would go with this one. Your custom HTML helper could look something like this:

    <%= Html.ExternalActionLink(
    "link text", 
    new { path = "/foo/bar.php" }
    new { param1 = "value1", param2 = "value2" }
) %>

    and could emit the following HTML:

    <a href="http://dev.blah.com/foo/bar.php?param1=value1&param2=value2">link text</a>
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