Are there events for before a controller is run?

Question

I know there are events for before/after a action is fired.

Is there anything higher up in the stack like before a controller is called?

Answer 1

There's no such notion as running a controller. Controllers are not run. They are classes which are instantiated and actions (methods) are invoked on them.

You could decorate your controller action with a custom [ActionFilter] attribute in which you could override the OnActionExecuting which will be called before the controller action is invoked. This technique also allows you a better separation of concerns.

Answer 2

ASP.Net MVC still runs through the HttpApplication pipeline, so you can still handle any of the events from BeginRequest through to PreRequestHandlerExecute by adding handlers to Global.asax.