Get HttpRequestMessage from ActionFilter or ASP.NET MVC Web Controller outside of Web API

Question

I am having a tuff time trying to get an instace of a HttpRequestMessage so I can pass it to the method GetCacheOutputProvider below from an ActionFilter and/or normal ASP.NET MVC Controller. I know I can from the Web API, but what about these instances.

public class CacheResetFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
    {
        public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
        {
            var cache = GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.CacheOutputConfiguration().GetCacheOutputProvider(HTTPREQUESTMESSAGE);
                cache.Contains("eventid=" + eventId);

            base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
        }

Request body is read only once and put in ActionArgument dictionary for ction filters. It should help you : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21351617/web-api-request-content-is-empty-in-action-filter — Rohit Garg, May 12 '17 at 06:28
@MikeFlynn Unless you construct the HttpRequestMessage yourself that is not possible out of the box because of how the two frameworks were developed separately. — Nkosi, May 15 '17 at 15:51
@MikeFlynn any particular reason for the mixing of MVC and Web API in the action filter? — Nkosi, May 15 '17 at 16:31
Yes I have an API that caches, and an admin side that updates it. I mean I would think its common to clear a cache when an update is made on a website to an api method. That shouldnt be unusual. — Mike Flynn, May 22 '17 at 15:10

Ashiquzzaman · Answer 1 · 2017-05-12T15:33:48.350

1.In a MVC Controller you can do like:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
   public ActionResult Test()
        {
            HttpRequestMessage httpRequestMessage =
                HttpContext.Items["MS_HttpRequestMessage"] as HttpRequestMessage;
            return View();        
        }
 }

2.In action filter you can do like :

public class HttpRequestMessageAttribute : System.Web.Mvc.ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuted(System.Web.Mvc.ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        HttpRequestMessage httpRequestMessage =
            filterContext.HttpContext.Items["MS_HttpRequestMessage"] as HttpRequestMessage;
        //var cache = GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.CacheOutputConfiguration().GetCacheOutputProvider(httpRequestMessage);
        //cache.Contains("eventid=" + eventId);

        base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);
    }
}

OR

    public class HttpRequestMessageAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
    {
        public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
        {
            HttpRequestMessage httpRequestMessage =
                filterContext.HttpContext.Items["MS_HttpRequestMessage"] as HttpRequestMessage;

            base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
        }
   }

Hopefully it's help for you.

So can you please share some thing details that I check your problem. I am very interested about it. — Ashiquzzaman, May 12 '17 at 02:47
None of these work on a regular .NET controller, MS_HttpRequestMessage is only available on a Web API controller. I would give up on this. — Mike Flynn, May 12 '17 at 14:57

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 15 '17 at 01:17

I don't think there is a simple way. You want an instance of HttpRequestMessage class which sematically represents a (current) request to WebAPI. But you are not inside WebAPI and don't handle any WebAPI requests. Thus it is logical that you can't easily have a valid instance of HttpRequestMessage (if you could, what URL would it point to?). IMHO the most obvious way to work this around is to use RegisterCacheOutputProvider method from CacheOutputConfiguration to inject your own cache provider that would return an instance of IApiOutputCache that you can directly access using other means (such as globally visible singleton). It looks there is only one standard implementation of IApiOutputCache: MemoryCacheDefault. So it looks like if you return it from your registered provider, you'll be OK.

If you want to be a more hacky, it looks like all MemoryCacheDefault instances internally use the same shared (static) field to do the actual work so you probably can just create new MemoryCacheDefault in your filter or controller and still be OK for now, but to me this sounds way to hacky comparing to the alternative from the first part of my answer.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 27 '23 at 04:06

I had the same issue in retrieving the httpRequestMessage and I went down a different route.

Identify: Why am I using the httpRequestMessage for? - In my case, I was using to know if the request is an ajax request.
Fix: Just replace the usages of httpRequestMessage's features with their counterparts.

How did I fix?

ActionExecutingContext doesn't have a way to retrieve httpRequestmessage, atleast none that I am aware of and I needed httpRequestmessage to obtain the headers "X-Requested-With".

Instead I used actionExecutedContext's HttpContext's headers property to see if i have these headers and that solved my issue on depending on httpRequestMessage.

I know this is not what you're looking for, but this gives a different view of solving this, so posting it here.

Thank you!

Get HttpRequestMessage from ActionFilter or ASP.NET MVC Web Controller outside of Web API

3 Answers3