Create class to return Session User Information

Question

Hello :) I am building an MVC5/EF6 system that has stores information about students with a number of user types . When the user logs in certain information about the user is stored in Session; UserID, UserTypeID etc. Different users have different privileges, and I often need to get the user information from Session within my ActionResult methods in each controller:

private Student GetCurrentStudentInfo()
{
    var currentuser = (SessionModel)Session["LoggedInUser"];
    var student = _db.Student.Find(currentuser.UserID);
    return student;
}

I have this method at the bottom of my controllers, which I call from each method depending on when I need this information. It gets the userID from the current logged in user and returns the profile information. I would like to be able to either:

1. Make this method available to all my controllers

2. Or create a class variable that I can use at the top of my controller, which would return this info:

    public class RegistrationWizardController : Controller { private readonly DefaultContext _db = new DefaultContext(); private UserInfo _userInfo = new UserInfo(); } 

I am very new to MVC and coding in general, so any help/opinions/other suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

Answer 1

You have a couple of options.

The first (and easier) of the two is to make all of your controllers inherit from a common base controller. To do this, make a base controller that extends from the default controller:

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    protected Student GetCurrentStudentInfo() //protected so we can access this method from derived classes
    {
        var currentuser = (SessionModel)Session["LoggedInUser"];
        var student = _db.Student.Find(currentuser.UserID);

        return student;
    }
}

Now, change your controllers to inherit the base controller you just created:

public class RegistrationWizardController : BaseController
{
    public ActionResult AnAction()
    {
        var student = this.GetCurrentStudentInfo(); //calls the method inherited from BaseController
    }
}

The other option you have is to use Dependency Injection. This is a bit more complicated, and much more abstract than the previous method. There are a bunch of Dependency Injection frameworks, my favorite is Ninject ( http://www.ninject.org/ ). This would probably be closer to the "Industry Standard" of doing something like this, and I would encourage you to at least look into it, but I think a sample would be a little out of scope for this question (do some side reading first). If you do decide to implement it and get stuck, post another question.