Creating ViewResults outside of Controllers in ASP.NET MVC
asp.net-mvc, controller
Solution
As I was writing this I thought of one way.
Rather than have the above code in a helper, I could put it into a subclass of Controller and then subclass this class for my actual controllers. This would allow me to call the protected View() method.
I don't like this particularly much because it requires inheritance to work, but it's still an option.
Problem
Several of my controller actions have a standard set of failure-handling behavior. In general, I want to: - Load an object based on the Route Data (IDs and the like) - If the Route Data does not point to a valid object (ex: through URL hacking) then inform the user of the problem and return an HTTP 404 Not Found - Validate that the current user has the proper permissions on the object - If the user doesn't have permission, inform the user of the problem and return an HTTP 403 Forbidden - If the above is successful, then do something with that object that's action-specific (ie: render it in a view). These steps are so standardized that I want to have reusable code to implement the behavior. My current plan of attack was to have a helper method to do something like this: ``` public static ActionResult HandleMyObject(this Controller controller, Func<MyObject,ActionResult> onSuccess) { var myObject = MyObject.LoadFrom(controller.RouteData). if ( myObject == null ) return NotFound(controller); if ( myObject.IsNotAllowed(controller.User)) return NotAllowed(controller); return onSuccess(myObject); } # NotAllowed() is pretty much the same as this public static NotFound(Controller controller){ controller.HttpContext.Response.StatusCode = 404 # NotFound.aspx is a shared view. ViewResult result = controller.View("NotFound"); return result; } ``` The problem here is that Controller.View() is a protected method and so is not accessible from a helper. I've looked at creating a new ViewResult instance explicitly, but there's enough properties to set that I'm wary about doing so without knowing the pitfalls first. What's the best way to create a ViewResult from outside a particular Controller?