A way to exclude action filters in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I\'ve run into several cases in ASP.NET MVC where I wanted to apply an action filter on every action except one or two. For example, say you have an AccountController. Eve

Answer 1

I prefer the solution outlined here. Though it's not as generic a solution as yours, I found it a bit more straightforward.

In my case, I was looking for a way to enable a CompressionFilter on everything but a few items. So I created an empty attribute like this:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple = false, Inherited = true)]
public sealed class DisableCompression : Attribute { }

Then in the main attribute, check for the presence of the attribute like so:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, Inherited = true, AllowMultiple = false)]
public class CompressionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        bool disabled = filterContext.ActionDescriptor.IsDefined(typeof(DisableCompression), true) ||
                        filterContext.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.IsDefined(typeof(DisableCompression), true);
        if (disabled)
            return;

        // action filter logic here...
    }
}

Though the page I linked to mentions that this is for MVC 3, it seems to work well enough way back in MVC 1 as well.

EDIT: showing some usage here in response to comments. Before I made the changes above, it looked exactly like this, except without the [DisableCompression] attribute flagging the method I wanted to exclude. There's no other refactoring involved.

[CompressionFilter]
public abstract class BaseController : Controller
{
}

public class SomeController : BaseController
{
    public ActionResult WantThisActionCompressed()
    {
        // code
    }

    [DisableCompression]
    public ActionResult DontWantThisActionCompressed()
    {
        // code
    }
}

Answer 2

I assume for years ago that the [AllowAnnonymous] attribute hadn't been added to ASP.NET MVC. Today I can have the [Authorize] attribute on top of my controller applying to all the Action methods and I just simply override this in Actions I require unauthorized users by adding the [AllowAnonymous] attributes to the specific actions.