How can I get controller type and action info from a url or from route data?

How can I get the controller action (method) and controller type that will be called, given the System.Web.Routing.RouteData?

My scenario is this – I want to be able to do perform certain actions (or not) in the OnActionExecuting method for an action.

However, I will often want to know not the current action, but the “root” action being called; by this I mean I may have a view called “Login”, which is my login page. This view may include
another partial view “LeftNav”. When OnActionExecuting is called for LeftNav, I want to be able to determine that it is really being called for the “root” aciton of Login.

I realise that by calling RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(actionExecutingContext.HttpContext), I can get the route for the “root” request, but how to turn this into
method and type info?

The only solution I have so far, is something like:

 var routeData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(actionExecutingContext.HttpContext)
 var routeController = (string)routeData.Values["controller"]; 
 var routeAction = (string)routeData.Values["action"];

The problem with this is that “routeController” is the controller name with the “Controller” suffix removed, and is not fully qualified; ie it is “Login”, rather than “MyCode.Website.LoginController”.

I would far rather get an actual Type and MethodInfo if possible, or at least a fully qualified type name.

Any thoughts, or alternative approaches?
[EDIT – this is ASP.Net MVC 1.0]

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

  protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
  {
     var type1 = filterContext.Controller.GetType();
     var type2 = filterContext.ActionDescriptor
                    .ControllerDescriptor.ControllerType;
  }

OK, sorry, I missed the “root” part.

Then, another way, you can save controller type to thread storage. Pseudocode:

  protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
  {
     if (!Thread.LocalStorage.Contains("root_controller"))
        Thread.LocalStorage["root_controller"] = 
            filterContext.ActionDescriptor
                    .ControllerDescriptor.ControllerType;
  }

Just an idea. I’m sure thread local storage is available in C#. The key idea here is that you save it only for first request, thus it’s always root controller.

Method 2

Here is the solution I compiled from various sources. The url variable should contain the URL of the action:

        url = "YOUR URL";
        // Original path is stored and will be rewritten in the end
        var httpContext = new HttpContextWrapper(HttpContext.Current);
        string originalPath = httpContext.Request.Path;

        try
        {
            // Fake a request to the supplied URL into the routing system
            httpContext.RewritePath(url);
            RouteData urlRouteData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(httpContext);

            // If the route data was not found (e.g url leads to another site) then authorization is denied.
            // If you want to have a navigation to a different site, don't use AuthorizationMenu
            if(urlRouteData != null)
            {
                string controllerName = urlRouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
                string actionName = urlRouteData.Values["action"].ToString();

                // Get an instance of the controller that would handle this route
                var requestContext = new RequestContext(httpContext, urlRouteData);
                var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory();
                var controller = (ControllerBase) controllerFactory.CreateController(requestContext, controllerName);

                // Find the action descriptor
                var controllerContext = new ControllerContext(httpContext, new RouteData(), controller);
                var controllerDescriptor = new ReflectedControllerDescriptor(controller.GetType());
                var actionDescriptor = controllerDescriptor.FindAction(controllerContext, actionName);
            }
        }
        finally
        {
            // Reset our request path.
            httpContext.RewritePath(originalPath);
        }

Method 3

public Type ControllerType(string controllerName)
{
   var fullName = controllerName + "Controller";
   var assemblyName = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName;
   return Activator.CreateInstance(assemblyName, fullTypeName).GetType();
}

public MethodInfo ActionMethodInfo(string actionName, Type controllerType)
{
   return controllerType.GetMethod(actionName);
}

Are you thinking of an implementation similar to this? Some Try/Catches required!

Method 4

MvcSiteMapProvider does this. Here is the code for this particular thing.

Here is the code

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0