ASP.NET MVC event that happens just before action is called?

Question

I want to set the value of Thread.CurrentCulture based on some route data, but I can't find an event to hook to that fires after the routes are calculated and before the action method is called.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could write a custom action filter attribute:

public class CustomFilterAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        // This method is executed before calling the action
        // and here you have access to the route data:
        var foo = filterContext.RouteData.Values["foo"];
        // TODO: use the foo route value to perform some action

        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}

And then you could decorate your base controller with this custom attribute. And here's a blog post illustrating a sample implementation of such filter.