Load ApiController from Anonymous assembly using IAssembliesResolver

Loading Controller form App domain is very easy and MVC/Web -Api can handle it by default. How to load controller from an assembly which is build out of current project?

The use case might be like this: You want to use self hosting for you Web-API application and you want to manually load all your assemblies or you want to use some assembly from another project without adding the controller file directly.

We can override default behavour of IAssemblyResolver with our custom assembly resolver class. Here is the process to implement.

     

      1)      Create one DLL project and add MVC/WebAPI . Here is our simple controller

public class DataController : ApiController

    {

        public string Get()

        {

            return "Hello";

        }

    }

       2)      Override default behavior of IAssemblyRsolver

public class CustomAssemblyResolver : IAssembliesResolver

    {

        public ICollection<Assembly> GetAssemblies()

        {

            List<Assembly> baseAssemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies().ToList();

            var controllersAssembly = Assembly.LoadFrom(@"C:\Controller.dll");

            baseAssemblies.Add(controllersAssembly);

            return baseAssemblies;

        }

    }

In this application I have kept dll in C:\. GetAssembly() function will pick assembly from current app domain at first and it will merge with Controller.dll.

      3)      Replace IAssemblyResolver with CustomAssemblyResolver

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(IAssembliesResolver), new CustomAssemblyResolver());

Add above code in Global page to register