Question

So I have an MVC app that should change the Website title, and header color based on the domain the app is hit from. So I have a simple table setup in SQL as such:

DomainName (PK), WebsiteTitle, HeaderColor

Domain1.com, Website Title for Domain 1, #ebebeb

So I am trying to figure out the best way to return this information for each page view. Sure I can go ahead and lookup the site info in each model thats returned from the controller. But are there any other ways I can approach this? Maybe at a lower level in the stack?

Thank you!

Answer 1

There are many ways you can do this. ActionFilters are one way, or in a BaseController.

You need to determine if every action requires this, or if only certain actions.

If you decide every action, create a controller base, inheriting from Controller, then overriding OnActionExecuting. In that method you can make you calls to fetch and add the data to viewdata. Like so:

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        filterContext.Controller.ViewData.Add("SiteTitle", "Site title");
        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}

If you prefer to use a base viewmodel that has this information, it would be best to override OnActionExectued where you can get access to the actions results, and modify the base model to set your values. Like so:

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    protected override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        var result = filterContext.Result as ViewResultBase;
        var baseModel = (BaseViewModel) result.ViewData.Model;

        baseModel.SiteTitle = "Site Title";

        base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
    }
}

Depending if you want an inheritence chain for your viewmodels. Either works. You’ll also notice that I just set the values. Use whatever source for values you need. If you are pulling them from the db, I would cache the values so that for every action you are not hitting the db for it.