Generating urls form MVC Routes in a Management layer...

Question

So... I have a business object/manager which is going to generate emails.

These emails will contain links to various content on the website... and therefore needs to understand about MVC routing.. or at least how to generate URLs for the website...

However my business object will not have access to a RequestContext etc and the email generation is not necessarily the result of a web request to a website (I have a dispatcher which runs on a background thread which will be generating the emails)

Any ideas how I can generate my urls without having access to a request - and therefore being unable to use URLHelper...

Thoughts?

Answer 1

I prefer to define schema and make both routing and business logic aware of it. Means different implementations of the same URL schema.

Some reasons why:

1. Your routing mechanism could change. For example in feature you can switch to url_rewrite module.
2. Possible issues with load-balanced installation.
3. You do not need even to try to use URLHelper in undocumented way.

BTW, you can replace HttpRequest from URLHelper easily. We used to use this for unit-testing. For more information just search for unit testing of the HttpContextBase or look at examples in source code of the MvcContrib. This can help to instantiate URL helper and all related stuff in non hosted environment. But I still do not think that this is a good idea.

Answer 2

In order to get at the UrlHelper outside of the controller, you need to feed it and the routing data the HttpContext. Here's an example:

using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;    

HttpContextBase context = new HttpContextWrapper(HttpContext.Current);
UrlHelper helper =  = new UrlHelper(new RequestContext(context, RouteTable.Routes.GetRouteData(context)));