MVC Filters With Dependency Injection

 Oct 6th, 2013

One of the most powerful features of the MVC OnRamp is the ability to have MVC Filters injected via our Inversion of Control (IoC) container, Castle.Windsor. There are several types of filters supported by ASP.NET MVC that allow you to handle orthogonal issues such as:

·         IExceptionFilter which is invoked whenever unhandled exceptions occur.

·         IActionFilter which is invoked just before and just after specific actions.

·         IAuthorizationFilter which is invoked when authorizing requests.

·         IResultFilter which is invoked on just before and just after results are returned.

Normally these filters are applied one of two ways:

·         Globally via specification in the App_Start, which can easily be resolved from the IoC container but which must be global in scope, and hence somewhat limiting.

·         Via Attribute on either a Controller or Action, which cannot be resolved from the IoC because we have no control over the instantiation of those attributes.

But MVC allows for another option, which is an IFilterProvider, this interface is called at the outset of any request, and is allowed to return at runtime instances of filters which are to be applied. Using this interface, we have created a class that resolves filters from within Castle.Windsor. Consider the following class:

public class IoCFilterProvider : IFilterProvider {     private readonly IEnumerable<Func<ControllerContext, ActionDescriptor, Filter>> registeredFilters;       public IoCFilterProvider(Func<ControllerContext, ActionDescriptor, Filter>[] registeredFilters)     {         this.registeredFilters = registeredFilters;     }       public IEnumerable<Filter> GetFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor)     {         return registeredFilters.Select(m => m.Invoke(controllerContext, actionDescriptor)).Where(m => m != null);     } }

This simple class takes as a dependencies an array of delegates, speficically an array of Func<> delegates which receive as parameters the ControllerContext and ActionDescriptor and which return an instance of the Filter class.

·         The ControllerContext class describes the controller that is about to be called.

·         The ActionDescriptor class describes the action on that controller which is about to be called.

Given this information, you can decide to either return a Filter which will be applied, or return a null which will take no action.

How do I register a filter?

In our FilterInstaller class you will see an example of registering such a filter:

public class FilterInstaller : IWindsorInstaller {     public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store)     {         container.Register(             Component.For<IFilterProvider>().ImplementedBy<IoCFilterProvider>(),             Component.For<ExceptionLoggingFilter>().ImplementedBy<ExceptionLoggingFilter>(),             Component.For<Func<ControllerContext,ActionDescriptor,Filter>>().Instance(                 (c,a) => new Filter(container.Resolve<ExceptionLoggingFilter>(), FilterScope.Last, int.MinValue))             );     } }

On line 8, we register a Func<ControllerContext,ActionDescriptor,Filter> and state that we will provide a specific instance of that delegate to be used.

On line 9, we use the lambda syntax to declare a delegate, which is provided (c,a) as the parameters of type ControllerContext and ActionDescriptor, and which has a body of:

1	new Filter(container.Resolve<ExceptionLoggingFilter>(), FilterScope.Last, int.MinValue)

In this simple case, we create an instance of the System.Web.Mvc.Filter class and provide it our ExceptionLoggingFilter resolved from the container, and then tell the Filter to run in the FilterScope.Last, aka run this filter after all others, and order it within that scope using the int.MinValue, aka I really mean last of all last filters.

You can easily extend these registrations to include other filters by simply registering their delegates with the container and deciding when to return an instance of Filter and when to return null based on your business need. Our example always returns, because we want to always log exceptions, but that is not required. If your delegate examines the input data and determines it does not need to run a filter, simply return null.