How to get all action names from a controller

Question

How could I write code to get all the action names from a controller in asp.net MVC?

I want to automatically list all the action names from a controller.

Does an

Answer 1

I've been wrestling with this question for a while now, and I believe I've come up with a solution that should work most of the time. It involves getting a ControllerDescriptor for the controller in question, and then checking each ActionDescriptor returned by ControllerDescriptor.GetCanonicalActions().

I ended up making an action that returned a partial view in my controller, but I think it's fairly easy to figure out what's going on so feel free to take the code and change it around to your needs.

[ChildActionOnly]
public ActionResult Navigation()
{
    // List of links
    List NavItems = new List();

    // Get a descriptor of this controller
    ReflectedControllerDescriptor controllerDesc = new ReflectedControllerDescriptor(this.GetType());

    // Look at each action in the controller
    foreach (ActionDescriptor action in controllerDesc.GetCanonicalActions())
    {
        bool validAction = true;

        // Get any attributes (filters) on the action
        object[] attributes = action.GetCustomAttributes(false);

        // Look at each attribute
        foreach (object filter in attributes)
        {
            // Can we navigate to the action?
            if (filter is HttpPostAttribute || filter is ChildActionOnlyAttribute)
            {
                validAction = false;
                break;
            }
        }

        // Add the action to the list if it's "valid"
        if (validAction)
            NavItems.Add(action.ActionName);
    }

    return PartialView(NavItems);
}

There are probably more filters to be looking out for, but for now this suits my needs.