When in a controller I can just access the User property. Outside of the controller I obviously cannot access the User property so after some reading I try HttpContext.Current.User, but HttpContext.Current is null. This seems quite simple and I would rather not change my architecture so that I pass the user from the controller onto my other classes.
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I've searched a lot and read a lot about the concept of MVC. But I still don't know how to connect them together. Suppose I have a controller class, view class and model class. If user did something in that view, view should notify controller the action and controller may need to communicate with model to get some data.
Now, does view hold a reference to the controller? Does the controller has a property of that model? Or they just using like "include"?
The data is saved in memory, or database? Memory means stored in variables.
More complicated case, one action from user may need many controllers and models involved. How to co-ordinate them together?
What I've done before is I create a "view controller", which has view and some actions of that view.
And sometimes there is no model. All data is passed by parameter. If there are some models, some of them are singleton so I can get it everywhere.
This is a very generic answer, depending on your system these can vary:
The Controller has a reference to the View, an IBOutlet for example. The View is not aware of the Controller, it's a dumb thing that receives info and displays it, that's it.
Depends on what you have in place, sometimes you don't need to persist the data and being on variables is enough. For persisting data, you have CoreData, plists or save them on the sandbox.
Normally you could have a parent Controller, holding references to child Controllers. Each child should be independent and the parent would be the "glue" between them.
I can point you to this repo I created, called iOS Architecture, to help you understand how the controller and the model interact.
Here are some more points:
When your Action returns a View("SomeView"), it will check first if you have a layout, if not it will look for SomeView.cshtml in the Views folder of that controller.
If you want SomeView to talk to any Action in the controller, what you can do is to do a FormMethod.Post and assign the correct model and of course the Action name. That action name should be decorated with [HttpPost] or you can do a FormMethod.Get and decorate it with [HttpGet] or just leave it blank since [HttpGet] is default.
If you want another action redirecting first to another action without going to a page, you use RedirectToAction() instead of View and change the type to ActionResult instead of ViewResult
I hope it makes sense to you :)
How would one go about performing controller actions from withing an ASP.net MVC user control?
My scenario is that I have a userID and I want to transform it into a name from the database. To do this I've annotated my model with a display type and put a User template in the shared display templates but I'm not sure where I should write the code which does the lookup to convert from userID to user name.
I think that code ought to go into your models and you should be calling it in your controller and passing it to your user-control in a viewdata. This is if I understood your question.
I would just have the model expose the name and not the userID. This way your view (user control) is only displaying the name and not trying to do a DB lookup. Your "User Control" model would be responsible for how it gets the name, i.e. the DB from your question.
In short, you don't do that.
You should be passing the necessary data to the MVC user control from the View, which in turn should be getting it's information from the controller.
The view (or user control) should not have any knowledge of the controller. You may want to use RenderAction instead of a user control if you feel that the view shouldn't be responsible for passing the necessary information into the user control.
In my asp.net mvc project I store two objects in the session when the user logs in. One is a User object (representing the logged in user) and the other is the Organisation object (representing the user's organisation).
I need one or both of these objects to be available in every action method. What's the most elegant way of dealing with this? At the moment each action takes parameters for each of these objects, with a custom model binder retrieving the objects from session. This at least encapsulates the session access but it's annoying to have the params in every method signature. Is there a better way?
Here's what most of the action methods look like.
public ActionResult Pending(IUser CurrentUser)
{
var users = CurrentUser.GetMyOrgPendingUsers();
return View(users);
}
Since you need to access IUser in almost every action you can have a base controller from where every other controller is derived.
In the base controller put IUser as a member variable and override the
OnActionExecuting() method in the base controller, in which you can put the code to access the session variables.
OnActionExecuting() will be called every time a action is called.
The Controller class has a User property. Have you considered using this rather than designing your own way to track the current user?
I'd rethink using IPrincipal here--it is very handy and allows you to work your way into the rest of the .NET authentication bits very seamlessly.
As for the problem at hand, perhaps the easiest clean course of action would be to wire them into a base controller class as protected properties. Slightly more elegant would be to create a user context class, that takes a reference to Session (or better yet, whatever base interfaces you are using in the session) and expose that class from the controller. The main advantage there is it makes it easier to change the backing store if need be and lets one encapsulate more behavior in general.
I have a User object on a Base controller, this is the standard type of User object you have with the .Net Membership Provider. I need this is decide if users have access to actions, views, and so on.
I am having a problem whereby I want to display user information on the Masterpage. Like a login view from WebForms. I tried to access the User object from the Masterpage but I can't.
So:
Am I breaking the separation of concerns by checking if the user is logged in on the view (simple if statement which changes what is displayed).
Can I simply access the base controller namespace to access this property or is there something wrong with that? When do the controllers get initialised?
As I write this I consider that having my base controller have this property might be a bad idea on the first place.
AGHH!! How would you handle checking user information to change the Masterpage.
Use this:
<% var user = ViewContext.HttpContext.User; %>
I recently started to look into asp.net mvc. Here is my issue.
Say every page on an application needs a variable set by the user, e.g. a date. If the user starts from url I provide, it is all good as I ask for that date and save it for the session. How can I redirect the user to the first page if they save the some other url (to a different controller and action).
In other words, I guess I am looking for something like [Authorize] attribute but on an application level.
Thanks for any help.
I would probably create a base controller that all of my controllers derive from. In the base controller I'd override the OnActionExecuting method to check the session for the required variable. If the variable isn't present, I would set the ActionExecutingContext Result property to a RedirectToRouteResult to the appropriate controller/action to set the variable.
Another alternative is to create a custom FilterAttribute that you decorate the appropriate controllers/actions with that does basically the same thing. I would only do this if the filter was to apply only to certain controllers or actions and not all as you describe in your question.