I'm attempting to create a generic controller, ie:
public class MyController<T> : Controller where T : SomeType
{ ... }
However, when I try to use it, I'm running into this error everywhere...
Controller name must end in 'Controller'
So, my question, Is it possible to make a generic controller in asp.net mvc?
Thanks!
If I understand you properly, what you are trying to do, is route all requests for a given Model through a generic controller of type T.
You would like the T to vary based on the Model requested.
You would like /Product/Index to trigger MyController<Product>.Index()
This can be accomplished by writing your own IControllerFactory and implementing the CreateController method like this:
public IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName)
{
Type controllerType = Type.GetType("MyController")
.MakeGenericType(Type.GetType(controllerName));
return Activator.CreateInstance(controllerType) as IController;
}
Yes you can, it's fine and I've used them lots myself.
What you need to ensure is that when you inherit from MyController you still end the type name with controller:
public class FooController : MyController<Foo>
{
...
}
The default controller factory uses "convention" around controller names when it's trying to find a controller to dispatch the request to. You could override this lookup functionality if you wanted, which could then allow your generic controller to work.
This MSDN article...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd695917.aspx
... has a good writeup of what's going on.
This is a duplicate of asp.net mvc generic controller which actually contains the correct answer. Jeff Fritz's answer is absolutely not correct. Creating your own IControllerFactory will not get past the limitation in ExpressionHelper.GetRouteValuesFromExpression which is generating the error you are seeing. Implementing your own IControllerFactory will still leave you with errors whenever you call RedirectToAction, BuildUrlFromExpression, ActionLink, RenderAction, BeginForm, any any methods that call those.
What is interesting to me, is that Microsoft's "restriction by convention" is already enforced by the constraint "where TController : Controller" that is placed upon the type in the ExpressionHelper.GetRouteValuesFromExpression method. No generic will ever satisfy the convention validation:
string controllerName = typeof(TController).Name;
if (!controllerName.EndsWith("Controller", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) {
throw new ArgumentException(MvcResources.ExpressionHelper_TargetMustEndInController, "action");
}
unless it is inherited by a class ending in "Controller" because typeof(AnyGeneric).Name will never end with "Controller".
If i was you, i'd get the MVC source and create a test MVC project with the source code so you can examine where the exception is generated and see what you can do about your generic idea and the enforced "*controller" naming convention.
Related
Recently i tried to create a MVC application using ASP.NET Core 2.0 and i had some values defined in appsettings.json,
"MySettings": {
"WebApiBaseUrl": "http://localhost:6846/api/"
}
In order to read these values i have added
services.Configure<MySettingsModel>(Configuration.GetSection("MySettings"));
above line in ConfigureServices method in Startup.cs
and in my home controller i have added
private readonly IOptions<MySettingsModel> appSettings;
public HomeController(IOptions<MySettingsModel> app)
{
appSettings = app;
}
MySettingsModel class is just a model with property same as key define in appsettings.json.
by this method i'm able to read the value of this key.
Now my issue is that i want to use this key in many controllers so i don't want to repeat this code in every controller so what i did was i created a BaseConntroller, added its constructor and i got my values there. But when i inherit other controllers with my BaseController , it throws me an error and tells me to generate it's constructor, so basically it tells me to add constructor in every controller which is what i wanted to avoid.
How can i achieve this?
You can see the image for the error
And these are the potential fixes that it shows me.
This is just basic C# inheritance. Derived classes must re-implement constructors on base classes (at least the ones you want or need). The only exception is the empty constructor, which is implicit. In other words, you simply need:
public class HomeController : BaseController
{
public HomeController(IOptions<MySettingsModel> app)
: base(app)
{
}
And, of course, you need to change the accessibility of the base class field to protected instead of private. Otherwise, derived classes will not be able to access it.
Of course, this doesn't really save you that much. However, there's no free lunch here. Like I said, this is a limitation of C#, itself, so you have no choice. Although, it's worth mentioning, that while this can sometimes be annoying, it's actually a kind of useful feature of C#. You can look at any class and see exactly what constructors it has available, without having to trace down all its ancestors.
Actually, there is a good solution here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/48886242/2060975
I am mostly using this method.
[Authorize]
[ApiController]
public abstract class ApiControllerBase : ControllerBase
{
private IOptions<AppSettings> _appSettings;
protected IOptions<AppSettings> appSettings => _appSettings ?? (_appSettings = (IOptions<AppSettings>)this.HttpContext.RequestServices.GetService(typeof(IOptions<AppSettings>)));
...
}
I hope it helps someone:)
I have implemented IAuthenticationFilter to create a custom one. in the constructor I use structureMap to get instance of my IUnitOfWork. this authentication logic is to check user status in the database and ....
IUnitOfWork uow;
public CustomAuthenticatationAttribute()
{
this.uow = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IUnitOfWork>();
}
I have configured structureMap to serve IUnitOfWork HttpContextScoped.
x.For<IUnitOfWork>().HttpContextScoped().Use(() => new MyDbContext());
but then something strange happened. I deleted the user in one action, but when the AuthenticationFilter is executed on another action, the instance of unitOfWork still returns the user ! I searched the web for hours and I come to this :
Are ActionFilterAttributes reused across threads? How does that work?
in short , it says that Filters are cached and used across requests !
Now I'm confused . how to deal with this ? shall I give up using unitOfWork and get back to using(var context = ....) ? or there is a correct way of using unitOfWork inside Filters .
I found a solution here
https://gist.github.com/ivanra/9019273
It replaces the DefaultFilterProvider and I prefer to avoid that if possible.
The solution you found with suppressing caching in the FilterProvider is actually the same solution that the MVC integration libraries for both Autofac and Simple Injector use.
But the caching behavior of attributes is just one of the many reasons why doing dependency injection in attributes is actually a bad idea.
The best solution is IMO to move to passive attributes if you can, or at least encapsulate the attributes logic and its dependencies into a component and don't do anything more than resolving and executing that component in the OnActionExecuting method. For instance:
public class CustomAuthenticatationAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext context)
{
var action =
ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IActionFilter<CustomAuthenticatationAttribute>>();
action.OnActionExecuting(this, context);
}
}
With ASP.NET MVC, when a route matches, the framework will determine the Controller type and then use the ControllerActivator class to create a new instance of it and then execute the Action method and finally return it's result to the request caller.
Just out of curiosity, what if I wanted to intervene exactly between the route and the Controller. Let's say controllers don't fit my needs. Let's say I just need to execute a random method in a class and return it's result.
What would I do then? What would I have to override? Can you please provide the path? A sample code would be appreciated too.
Create your own controller factory which implements IController factory. Something like below.
public class MyControllerFactory : IControllerFactory
Implement IControllerFactory interface
Register your new controller factory in Global.asax Application_Start event.
ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(typeof(MyControllerFactory));
You can check code of DefaultControllerFactory as reference for implementing your own factory.
I have an action method on a Spring MVC controller that has an argument annotated with #ModelAttribute. However, I don't know at compile time what the type of this parameter will be - I know the abstract base type but not the derived type.
At runtime, I will be able to decide what class I am expecting and I will be able to get a new'd up instance of this class. However, I have no idea what code I should be calling to parse the request data in the same fashion that #ModelAttribute does.
I've looked around and it seems that if i can get a hold of a WebRequestDataBinder I can use that to populate my object, but for that I need a BinderFactory and this is where I kind of get lost.
Can anyone give me some pointers here - or tell me that I am looking at it the wrong way and need to do something else?
you can inject the model itself in your controllers method and access the attribute yourself.
#RequestMapping(...)
public void doStuff(ModelMap model) {
Object attr = model.get("nameOfAttribute");
// ...
}
What options are there for serialization when returning instances of custom classes from a WebService?
We have some classes with a number of child collection class properties as well as other properties that may or may not be set depending on usage. These objects are returned from an ASP.NET .asmx WebService decorated with the ScriptService attribute, so are serialized via JSON serialization when returned by the various WebMethods.
The problem is that the out of the box serialization returns all public properties, regardless of whether or not they are used, as well as returning class name and other information in a more verbose manner than would be desired if you wanted to limit the amount of traffic.
Currently, for the classes being returned we have added custom javascript converters that handle the JSON serializtion, and added them to the web.config as below:
<system.web.extensions>
<scripting>
<webServices>
<jsonSerialization>
<converters>
<add name="CustomClassConverter" type="Namespace.CustomClassConverter" />
</converters>
</jsonSerialization>
</webServices>
</scripting>
</system.web.extensions>
But this requires a custom converter for each class. Is there any other way to change the out of the box JSON serialization, either through extending the service, creating a custom serializer or the like?
Follow Up
#marxidad:
We are using the DataContractJsonSerializer class in other applications, however I have been unable to figure out how to apply it to these services. Here's an example of how the services are set-up:
[ScriptService]
public class MyService : System.Web.Services.WebService
{
[WebMethod]
public CustomClass GetCustomClassMethod
{
return new customClass();
}
}
The WebMethods are called by javascript and return data serialized in JSON. The only method we have been able to change the serialization is to use the javascript converters as referenced above?
Is there a way to tell the WebService to use a custom DataContractJsonSerializer? Whether it be by web.config configuration, decorating the service with attributes, etc.?
Update
Well, we couldn't find any way to switch the out of the box JavaScriptSerializer except for creating individual JavaScriptConverters as above.
What we did on that end to prevent having to create a separate converter was create a generic JavaScriptConverter. We added an empty interface to the classes we wanted handled and the SupportedTypes which is called on web-service start-up uses reflection to find any types that implement the interface kind of like this:
public override IEnumerable<Type> SupportedTypes
{
get
{
foreach (Assembly assembly in AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies())
{
AssemblyBuilder dynamicAssemblyCheck = assembly as AssemblyBuilder;
if (dynamicAssemblyCheck == null)
{
foreach (Type type in assembly.GetExportedTypes())
{
if (typeof(ICustomClass).IsAssignableFrom(type))
{
yield return type;
}
}
}
}
}
}
The actual implementation is a bit different so that the type are cached, and we will likely refactor it to use custom attributes rather than an empty interface.
However with this, we ran into a slightly different problem when dealing with custom collections. These typically just extend a generic list, but the custom classes are used instead of the List<> itself because there is generally custom logic, sorting etc. in the collection classes.
The problem is that the Serialize method for a JavaScriptConverter returns a dictionary which is serialized into JSON as name value pairs with the associated type, whereas a list is returned as an array. So the collection classes could not be easily serialized using the converter. The solution for this was to just not include those types in the converter's SupportedTypes and they serialize perfectly as lists.
So, serialization works, but when you try to pass these objects the other way as a parameter for a web service call, the deserialization breaks, because they can't be the input is treated as a list of string/object dictionaries, which can't be converted to a list of whatever custom class the collection contains. The only way we could find to deal with this is to create a generic class that is a list of string/object dictionaries which then converts the list to the appropriate custom collection class, and then changing any web service parameters to use the generic class instead.
I'm sure there are tons of issues and violations of "best practices" here, but it gets the job done for us without creating a ton of custom converter classes.
If you don't use code-generated classes, you can decorate your properties with the ScriptIgnoreAttribute to tell the serializer to ignore certain properties. Xml serialization has a similar attribute.
Of course, you cannot use this approach if you want to return some properties of a class on one service method call and different properties of the same class on a different service method call. If you want to do that, return an anonymous type in the service method.
[WebMethod]
[ScriptMethod]
public object GimmieData()
{
var dalEntity = dal.GimmieEntity(); //However yours works...
return new
{
id = dalEntity.Id,
description = dalEntity.Desc
};
}
The serializer could care less about the type of the object you send to it, since it just turns it into text anyway.
I also believe that you could implement ISerializable on your data entity (as a partial class if you have code-gen'd data entities) to gain fine-grained control over the serialization process, but I haven't tried it.
I know this thread has been quiet for a while, but I thought I'd offer that if you override the SupportedTypes property of JavaScriptConverter in you custom converter, you can add the types that should use the converter. This could go into a config file if necessary. That way you wouldn't need a custom converter for each class.
I tried to create a generic converter but couldn't figure out how to identify it in the web.config. Would love to find out if anyone else has managed it.
I got the idea when trying to solve the above issue and stumbled on Nick Berardi's "Creating a more accurate JSON .NET Serializer" (google it).
Worked for me:)
Thanks to all.
If you're using .NET 3.x (or can), a WCF service is going to be your best bet.
You can selectively control which properties are serialized to the client with the [DataMember] attribute. WCF also allows more fine-grained control over the JSON serialization and deserialization, if you desire it.
This is a good example to get started: http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2007/09/04/using-wcf-json-linq-and-ajax-passing-complex-types-to-wcf-services-with-json-encoding.aspx
You can use the System.Runtime.Serialization.Json.DataContractJsonSerializer class in the System.ServiceModel.Web.dll assembly.
Don't quote me on this working for certain, but I believe this is what you are looking for.
[WebMethod]
[ScriptMethod(ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)]
public XmlDocument GetXmlDocument()
{
XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.LoadXml(_xmlString);
return xmlDoc;
}