HttpContext on instances of Controllers are null in ASP.net MVC

Question

This may not be the correct way to use controllers, but I did notice this problem and hadn't figured out a way to correct it.

public JsonResult SomeControllerAction() {      //The current method has the HttpContext just fine     bool currentIsNotNull = (this.HttpContext == null); //which is false          //creating a new instance of another controller     SomeOtherController controller = new SomeOtherController();     bool isNull = (controller.HttpContext == null); // which is true      //The actual HttpContext is fine in both     bool notNull = (System.Web.HttpContext.Current == null); // which is false          } 

I've noticed that the HttpContext on a Controller isn't the "actual" HttpContext that you would find in System.Web.HttpContext.Current.

Is there some way to manually populate the HttpContextBase on a Controller? Or a better way to create an instance of a Controller?

Answer 1

For now I'm going to do the following. This seems to be an acceptable fix...

public new HttpContextBase HttpContext {     get {         HttpContextWrapper context =              new HttpContextWrapper(System.Web.HttpContext.Current);         return (HttpContextBase)context;                     } } 

Where this is added to a Controller class these Controllers are inheriting from.

I'm not sure if the HttpContext being null is the desired behavior, but this will fix it in the meantime for me.

Answer 2

Controllers are not designed to be created manually like you're doing. It sounds like what you really should be doing is putting whatever reusable logic you have into a helper class instead.