Add URL in web.config and access it in controller

Question

I have an URL like this:

https://bachqy.desk.info/automalog.aspx?user=""&carid=""

In my controller, I have an action method that passes two parameters in the above, to redirect the URL. I do not want to hardcode the URL in the controller.

public ActionResult NavigateToCar(string userId, string CarID)
{
    return new RedirectResult(
        "https://bachqy.desk.info/automalog.aspx?user="+userId+"&carid="+CarID);
}

Inside the controller, in the ActionResult, how can I access the URL from the web.config and pass the following parameters?

How can I pass the URL in the web.config and access the URL and pass the parameters in the controller in ASP MVC?

Answer 1

Use ConfigurationManager.AppSettings to read from your "Web.config" file.

To define your URL, you could use something like this in that file:

<appSettings>
    <add 
       name="MyUrlFromWebConfig" 
       value="https://bachqy.desk.info/automalog.aspx?user={UserID}&amp;carid={CarID}" />
</appSettings>

(Be sure to escape/encode the & as & to keep your XML valid)

Later in your code, use:

public ActionResult NavigateToCar(string userId, string CarID)
{
    var url = ConfigurationManager.AppSetting["MyUrlFromWebConfig"];

    url = url.Replace("{UserID}", Server.UrlEncode(userId));
    url = url.Replace("{CarID}", Server.UrlEncode(carID));

    return new RedirectResult(url);
}

(Also be sure to URL-encode the replacement strings to still have a valid URL)

---

I would vote against using {0} and {1} in the URL in the "Web.config" file, and do your own placeholders and replacement (like {UserID} in my example above) to be more expressive and not rely on your String.Format call to have the correct number and order of format arguments coming from the "Web.config" entry.