Redirect to last visited page (stored in a cookie)

Question

In our MVC application we want the user, after he is logged in, to be redirected to the page he visted last in a previous session.

What is a good approach for achieving this?

I am thinking of an httpmodule-->begin request or via the global.asax

And at which point in the requestprocess should I put the logic to check whether the cookie exists and do the redirect? In the Application.init?

Any advice would be really appreciated!

Answer 1

That is correct, there is no event on click. However, there is a much simpler soluction, MVC handles form submits and redirects quite well. To store the last visited URL, you could use an action filter on your controller. Then to handle the redirect, create two Login functions. One handles the GET request, the other the POST request. In the POST request, after having verified authentication, retrieve the URL (or action) from the cookie and redirect the user.

It would be something like this:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Login()
{
    return View();
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Login(LoginViewModel model)
{
    if (authenticated)
    {
        //get cookie information
        HttpCookie cookie;
        cookie = Request.Cookies["StoredURLFromLastSession"];
        String StoredURLFromLastSession = cookie.Value;

        //Choose one of these redirect methods
        //returns to a hard coded URL
        //return Redirect(StoredURLFromLastSession);

        //redirects to a route (using routes created in global.asax
        //return RedirectToRoute(StoredURLFromLastSession);

        //redirects to a specific action/controller
        //return RedirectToAction(StoredURLFromLastSession);
    }
}

Hope this helps.