Access Viewbag property on all views

Question

How can I access some ViewBag properties across all my views? I want to have some information like current user name, etc accessible everywhere, but without having to to specifi

Answer 1

One way: Create a custom attribute, then you can apply it globally in the FilterConfig. Then you don't have to do anything in your controllers.

public class MyCustomViewActionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        dynamic ViewBag = filterContext.Controller.ViewBag;

        ViewBag.Id = "123";
        ViewBag.Name = "Bob";
    }
}

In App_Start/FilterConfig.cs:

    public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
    {
        filters.Add(new MyCustomViewActionFilter());
    }

Another way if all you need is the User information. You can add the following to the top of your view:

@using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity

Then access your User Name using the following syntax:

@User.Identity.GetUserName()

You can also override the IPrincipal implementation and provide your own properties and methods to add more information you need to render.

UPDATE: looking at MVC 6 in Asp.Net vNext this is actually baked into the framework. http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/aspnet-vnext/vc#inj