MVC get all action methods

Question

Is there a way to get a list of all Actions Methods of my MVC 3 project?

Do you mean Actions or Views? If you mean Views do you include Partial views? Also which viewengine? If you're using the default then you could use reflection to get a list of every class in your assembly/namespace that inherits from System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage or ViewPage. Actions you can do the same kind of thing - use reflection to identify all the classes inheriting from Controller and all their public methods that return an ActionResult derivative. — RichardW1001, Apr 27 '11 at 09:20
Please update the question with that additional information. — Richard, Apr 27 '11 at 10:41

Moeri · Answer 1 · 2013-10-08T09:21:05.907

This will give you a dictionary with the controller type as key and an IEnumerable of its MethodInfos as value.

        var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies(); // currently loaded assemblies
        var controllerTypes = assemblies
            .SelectMany(a => a.GetTypes())
            .Where(t => t != null
                && t.IsPublic // public controllers only
                && t.Name.EndsWith("Controller", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) // enfore naming convention
                && !t.IsAbstract // no abstract controllers
                && typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(t)); // should implement IController (happens automatically when you extend Controller)
        var controllerMethods = controllerTypes.ToDictionary(
            controllerType => controllerType,
            controllerType => controllerType.GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance).Where(m => typeof(ActionResult).IsAssignableFrom(m.ReturnType)));

It looks in more than just the current assembly and it will also return methods that, for example, return JsonResult instead of ActionResult. (JsonResult actually inherits from ActionResult)

Edit: For Web API support

Change

&& typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(t)); // should implement IController (happens automatically when you extend Controller)

to

&& typeof(IHttpController).IsAssignableFrom(t)); // should implement IHttpController (happens automatically when you extend ApiController)

and remove this:

.Where(m => typeof(ActionResult).IsAssignableFrom(m.ReturnType))

Because Web API methods can return just about anything. (POCO's, HttpResponseMessage, ...)

+1 for a method that returns more details (I like how it groups the 'Actions' with their respective 'Controllers') — JakeJ, Oct 07 '13 at 22:42
In case of webapi this code get many redundant methods - constructors, all public properties (inherited from ApiController), etc. More precise method described here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28069206/how-can-i-get-the-list-of-all-actions-of-apicontroller — LbISS, Dec 28 '15 at 19:16

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 27 '11 at 09:30

You can use this to reflect over the assemblies at runtime to produce a list of methods in Controllers that return ActionResult:

    public IEnumerable<MethodInfo> GetMvcActionMethods()
    {
        return
            Directory.GetFiles(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location)
                .Select(Assembly.LoadFile)
                .SelectMany(
                    assembly =>
                    assembly.GetTypes()
                            .Where(t => typeof (Controller).IsAssignableFrom(t))
                            .SelectMany(type => (from action in type.GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance) 
                                                 where action.ReturnType == typeof(ActionResult) 
                                                 select action)
                                        )
                    );
    }

This will give you the actions, but not the list of Views (i.e. it won't work if you can use different views in each action)

This method will not include action methods that return "FileContentResult", "JsonResult", ... See my response below — Moeri, Jun 11 '13 at 13:04

MVC get all action methods

2 Answers2