ASP.NET MVC Chained Controller Factory

My last post on the REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK received an interesting comment… Basically, the spirit of the comment was: “There are tons of controller factories out there, but you can only use one at a time!”. This is true. One can have an IControllerFactory for MEF, for Castle Windsor, a custom one that creates a controller based on the current weather, … Most of the time, these IControllerFactory  implementations do not glue together… Unless you chain them!

Chaining IControllerFactory

The ChainedControllerFactory that I will be creating is quite easy: it builds a list of IControllerFactory instances that may be able to create an IController and asks them one by one to create it. The one that can create it, will be the one that delivers the controller. In code:

[code:c#]

public class ChainedControllerFactory : IControllerFactory
{
    const string CHAINEDCONTROLLERFACTORY = "__chainedControllerFactory";

    protected List<IControllerFactory> factories = new List<IControllerFactory>();

    public ChainedControllerFactory Register(IControllerFactory factory)
    {
        factories.Add(factory);
        return this;
    }

    public IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName)
    {
        IController controller = null;
        foreach (IControllerFactory factory in factories)
        {
            controller = factory.CreateController(requestContext, controllerName);
            if (controller != null)
            {
                requestContext.HttpContext.Items[CHAINEDCONTROLLERFACTORY] = factory;
                return controller;
            }
        }

        return null;
    }

    public void ReleaseController(IController controller)
    {
        IControllerFactory factory =
            HttpContext.Current.Items[CHAINEDCONTROLLERFACTORY] as IControllerFactory;
        if (factory != null)
            factory.ReleaseController(controller);
    }
}

[/code]

We have to register this one as the default IControllerFactory in Global.asax.cs:

[code:c#]

protected void Application_Start()
{
    ChainedControllerFactory controllerFactory = new ChainedControllerFactory();
    controllerFactory
        .Register(new DummyControllerFactory())
        .Register(new OnlyHomeControllerFactory())
        .Register(new DefaultControllerFactory());

    ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(controllerFactory);

    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

[/code]

Note: the DummyControllerFactory and the OnlyHomeControllerFactory are some sample, stupid IControllerFactory implementations.

Caveats

There is actually one caveat to know when using this ChainedControllerFactory: not all controller factories out there follow the convention of returning null when they can not create a controller. The ChainedControllerFactory expects null to determine if it should try the next IControllerFactory in the chain.

Download source code

You can download example source code here: MvcChainedControllerFactory.zip (244.37 kb) (sample uses MVC 2, code should work on MVC 1 as well)

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