How do I get the Controller and Action names from

Question

There's a lot of information for building Uris from Controller and Action names, but how can I do this the other way around?

Basically, all I'm trying to achieve is to get the Controller and Action names from the referring page (i.e. Request.UrlReferrer). Is there an easy way to achieve this?

Answer 1

This is a method I made to extract url simplified from referrer because I had token (finished with "))/") in my URL so you can extract easily controller and action from this:

private static string GetURLSimplified(string url)
    {
        string separator = "))/";
        string callerURL = "";

        if (url.Length > 3)
        {
            int index = url.IndexOf(separator);
            callerURL = url.Substring(index + separator.Length);
        }
        return callerURL;
    }

Answer 2

The RouteData object can access this info:

 var controller = RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
 var action = RouteData.Values["action"].ToString();

Answer 3

To add to gdoran's accepted answer, I found that the action doesn't get populated if a custom route attribute is used. The following works for me:

public static void SetUpReferrerRouteVariables(HttpRequestBase httpRequestBase, ref string previousAreaName, ref string previousControllerName, ref string previousActionName)
{
    // No referrer found, perhaps page accessed directly, just return.
    if (httpRequestBase.UrlReferrer == null) return;

    // Split the url to url + QueryString.
    var fullUrl = httpRequestBase.UrlReferrer.ToString();
    var questionMarkIndex = fullUrl.IndexOf('?');
    string queryString = null;
    var url = fullUrl;
    if (questionMarkIndex != -1) // There is a QueryString
    {
        url = fullUrl.Substring(0, questionMarkIndex);
        queryString = fullUrl.Substring(questionMarkIndex + 1);
    }

    // Arrange.
    var request = new HttpRequest(null, url, queryString);
    var response = new HttpResponse(new StringWriter());
    var httpContext = new HttpContext(request, response);

    var routeData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(new HttpContextWrapper(httpContext));
    if (routeData == null) throw new AuthenticationRedirectToReferrerDataNotFoundException();

    // Extract the data.
    var previousValues = routeData.Values;
    previousAreaName = previousValues["area"] == null ? string.Empty : previousValues["area"].ToString();
    previousControllerName = previousValues["controller"] == null ? string.Empty : previousValues["controller"].ToString();
    previousActionName = previousValues["action"] == null ? string.Empty : previousValues["action"].ToString();
    if (previousActionName != string.Empty) return;
    var routeDataAsListFromMsDirectRouteMatches = (List<RouteData>)previousValues["MS_DirectRouteMatches"];
    var routeValueDictionaryFromMsDirectRouteMatches = routeDataAsListFromMsDirectRouteMatches.FirstOrDefault();
    if (routeValueDictionaryFromMsDirectRouteMatches == null) return;
    previousActionName = routeValueDictionaryFromMsDirectRouteMatches.Values["action"].ToString();
    if (previousActionName == "") previousActionName = "Index";
}