PermanentRedirectResult - a 301 HTTP Redirect for ASP.net MVC

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

For a little project to learn ASP.net MVC, I needed my Controller to return a HTTP 301 Redirect. Unfortunately, just calling return Redirect(url) returns a HTTP 302 instead of a 301. After checking on the MVC Forums, there seems to be no "official" way to perform a 301 Redirect in a Controller. Of course, you can always modify the Response directly, but I decided that returning an ActionResult would be cleaner (and I think that makes it easier to unit test), even though it is essentially doing exactly that, setting a custom Status Code and Redirect Location.

So here is my little PermanentRedirectResult:

public class PermanentRedirectResult : ActionResult
{
    public string Url { get; set; }

    public PermanentRedirectResult(string url)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(url))
        {
            throw new ArgumentException("url is null or empty", "url");
        }
        this.Url = url;
    }

    public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
    {
        if (context == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("context");
        }
        context.HttpContext.Response.StatusCode = 301;
        context.HttpContext.Response.RedirectLocation = Url;
    }
}