Various Extension points of ASP.NET MVC with real time example

Current software industry has adapted MVC pattern hugely, not only in Microsoft’s stack but also in Other like PHP ,ruby on Rails etc.

Let’s stick on MVC on top of Microsoft’s platform as I am .NET developer and love Microsoft’s technology to develop application. We all know, ASP.NET MVC has many advantages which made this booming technology in market. As per my view the first and most strongest point of MVC is it’s architecture, yes the decouple architecture.

The Idea behind the decouple architecture is to make it flexible in extreme level. If we see the complete flow of request in MVC pipeline, we will see that the request is going through various modules and the modules are independent.

I mean we can easily detach/attach any module in pipeline. Now, question is what is my profit by attaching or detaching module?

• If we detach any module, the execution flow may speed up because the path will      decrease.
• We can attach our own module to implement our custom behavior which will override the normal flow of execution.  

The last point is very important, In MVC we can easily inject our own logic in middle of execution and the concept of extensibility comes here.

Being a software developer, we believe and follow one guideline that is “Module is open for extension but close for modification”. It means we can extend the functionality of a module but should not modify functionality of module. So that we will find various extension point of MVC and implement out custom logic there.

Now, let us try to analyze MVC pipeline to detect various extensibility point and we will relate some real time scenario to understand the need of extensibility.

At a very high level, the lifecycle of a request in ASP.NET MVC is:

•      The browser sends the GET or POST HTTP request to application;

• The request is inspected and routed to the right controller and the right action;

• The action collects or creates the data that needs to be returned to the browser very often from DB or other sources;
• 
  
• This data is passed to the view that renders the response, which is sent back to the browser.

In time of Routing

This is one good extension point where we can implement our own custom logic. There is once default routing pattern, which is given by Microsoft, but in need we can implement our own custom routing mechanism.

Once the Route has been selected, the corresponding IRouteHandler is called. The default one calls the MvcHandler, which starts the real processing inside ASP.NET MVC. Obviously, if you replace the default handler with something completely different, you also take over the processing of the request, and so all the steps that follow might not apply anymore.

Real time Example: Say for example we want to set route constraint in url path , then we can implement our custom logic to get it done. Another example is to implement dynamic routing which will get generate from Database or some other data source.

Delegating handler

If you are experienced with HttpHandler and HttpModule then probably you know how to inject your code in this section. This is MVC pipeline which executes after route initialization/selection. This is one good place to implement security in application.

Real time scenario: If you want to implement our own piece of code to implement authentication or authorization then this is the best place to do. You can sniff header of HTTP request and based on that you can make decision whether you will allow the request to next level or not?

Controller selection

Rather I would say before selection of controller. Based on route pattern and parameter IControllerFactory creates an instance of a controller and in this point, we can inject our IoC container to solve the dependency of controller

Real time scenario : For example ,we want to inject the dependency of controller in our application and for that we have adapted constructor injection pattern. For that we can create one dependency repository using any IoC container and can inject this in time of controller instantiation. The IoC container module is smart enough to handle this automatically.  

In time of Action execution

Once the controller has been instantiated, the specified action has to be executed, and this is handled by the IActionInvoker. As with the IRouteHandler, in theory you could completely replace this component with your own implementation, but then you will be developing 

against your own conventions. So, there is scope to inject our own logic before and after of action execution in technical tern which is called Action Filter.

There are 5 types of Action filters and those are

• ·         Authentication (added in MVC 5)
• ·         Authorization
• ·         Action Filter
• ·         Result Filter
• ·         Exception Filter

 In need can extend each and every filter and implement our custom action filter

 Real time scenario: For example, you want to implement global error handling mechanism in your application. For same you can create one action filter and can decorate your controller with the filter.

Implement your Own view Engine

There are many action results: one simply returns a text string, another returns a binary file or a Json formatted result. Yet the most important Action Result is the ViewResult, which renders and returns an HTML page to the browser.

We know that the HTML processing happens in view engine and if you want you can create your own View engine to render HTML page

Real time scenario: There are many third party view engine in market other than ASPX and Razor view engine. They has their own mechanism to render view, In need you too can create your own view engine with your own HTML tag set.

So, those are few very important and popular extensibility point of ASP.NET MVC where you can get your magic done!