Register .net MVC3 ControllerContext into windsor container

Question

With ASP.NET MVC3 what would be the best way to register the requests ControllerContext into castle windsor container? Ultimately I'd like to be able to say

container.Resolve<ControllerContext>();

and have the requests controller context returned.

More detail

The vast majority of my actions are just going to do some validation, authentication, etc.. before sending a message to nservicebus to actually do the work. To avoid having to copy/paste these 20/30 lines of code all over the place I have put them into a handler class which my controllers take a dependency on in the constructor, the actions then call this class which leaves my actions containing just one line of code.

One of the child classes that makes up the handler needs to know about the route that was taken, I could just pass the controller to the handler and then onto this class but it seems a bit messy. It would be nice if there was a way to get Windsor registered to provide it for me.

Answer 1

I don't think you can register the ControllerContext without some very ugly hacks, and IMHO it's not a good idea anyway. The ControllerContext belongs to the controller, it's not meant to be shared around.

However, if you only need the routing information, you can register it like this (UNTESTED!):

container.Register(Component.For<HttpContextBase>()
                    .UsingFactoryMethod(() => new HttpContextBaseWrapper(HttpContext.Current))
                    .LifeStyle.PerWebRequest,
                   Component.For<RouteData>()
                    .UsingFactoryMethod(k => RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(k.Resolve<HttpContextBase>()))
                    .LifeStyle.PerWebRequest);

Also see ASP.NET MVC & Windsor.Castle: working with HttpContext-dependent services for more details.

I don't know concretely what you're trying to achieve but I'd look into doing it with filters or custom ActionResults instead.