How do I get the Controller and Action names from the Referrer Uri?

Question

There\'s a lot of information for building Uris from Controller and Action names, but how can I do this the other way around?

Basically, all I\'m trying to achieve i

Answer 1

@gordon's solution works, but you need to use

 return RedirectToAction(actionName.ToString(), controllerName.ToString(),values);

if you want to go to previous action

Answer 2

This is a method I made to extract url simplified from referrer because I had token (finished with "))/") in my URL so you can extract easily controller and action from this:

private static string GetURLSimplified(string url)
    {
        string separator = "))/";
        string callerURL = "";

        if (url.Length > 3)
        {
            int index = url.IndexOf(separator);
            callerURL = url.Substring(index + separator.Length);
        }
        return callerURL;
    }

Answer 3

Here is a lightweight way to do this without creating response objects.

var values = RouteDataContext.RouteValuesFromUri(Request.UrlReferrer);

var controllerName = values["controller"];
var actionName = values["action"];

Uses this custom HttpContextBase class

public class RouteDataContext : HttpContextBase {
    public override HttpRequestBase Request { get; }

    private RouteDataContext(Uri uri) {
        var url = uri.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Path);
        var qs = uri.GetComponents(UriComponents.Query,UriFormat.UriEscaped);

        Request = new HttpRequestWrapper(new HttpRequest(null,url,qs));
    }

    public static RouteValueDictionary RouteValuesFromUri(Uri uri) {
        return RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(new RouteDataContext(uri)).Values;
    }
}

Answer 4

To expand on gdoron's answer, the Uri class has methods for grabbing the left and right parts of the URL without having to do string parsing:

url = Request.UrlReferrer.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Path);
querystring = Request.UrlReferrer.Query.Length > 0 ? uri.Query.Substring(1) : string.Empty;

// Arranges
var request = new HttpRequest(null, url, queryString);
var response = new HttpResponse(new StringWriter());
var httpContext = new HttpContext(request, response)

var routeData = RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(new HttpContextWrapper(httpContext));

// Extract the data    
var values = routeData.Values;
var controllerName = values["controller"];
var actionName = values["action"];
var areaName = values["area"];

Answer 5

The RouteData object can access this info:

 var controller = RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
 var action = RouteData.Values["action"].ToString();

Answer 6

I don't believe there is any built-in way to retrieve the previous Controller/Action method call. What you could always do is wrap the controllers and action methods so that they are recorded in a persistent data store, and then when you require the last Controller/Action method, just retrieve it from the database (or whatever you so choose).