ASP.Net MVC 4 Use of Attribute or BaseController?

Question

I have a controller with several actions. The Action should be redirected if the IsCat field on a service is false:

so something like this:

    public ActionResult MyCatAction()
    {
        if (MyService.IsCat==false)
            return RedirectToAnotherControllerAction();
     ...

Can this be done in an Attribute and applied to the entire Controller's set of Actions?

Answer 1

Action filter is the way to go in this case:

Action filter, which wraps the action method execution. This filter can perform additional processing, such as providing extra data to the action method, inspecting the return value, or canceling execution of the action method.

Here's a nice MSDN How To: How to: Create a Custom Action Filter

In your case, you'd have something like this:

public class RedirectFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        if (MyService.IsCat==false)
            return RedirectToAnotherControllerAction();
    }
}

Then, you'd apply this filter on the controller level (apply to all controller actions)

[RedirectFilterAttribute]
public class MyController : Controller
{
   // Will apply the filter to all actions inside this controller.

    public ActionResult MyCatAction()
    {

    }    
}

or per action:

[RedirectFilterAttribute]
public ActionResult MyCatAction()
{
     // Action logic
     ...
}