ASP.NET MVC Ajax Redirect

I’ve had several occasions where I have needed to make an Ajax request to a secure action on the server (i.e. an action that requires the user to be logged in). The problem is…sometimes the user’s session will timeout between the time they access the secure page and the time they make the secure Ajax request. My action notices this and redirects the user to the login page…but if its an Ajax request then a simple 302 redirect just won’t work. Here’s a method that will.

public class MyBaseController : System.Web.Mvc.Controller
{
    protected override RedirectResult Redirect(string url)
    {
        return new AjaxAwareRedirectResult(url);
    }
}

public class AjaxAwareRedirectResult : RedirectResult
{
    public AjaxAwareRedirectResult(string url)
        : base(url)
    {
    }

    public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
    {
        if (context.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request.IsAjaxRequest())
        {
            string destinationUrl = UrlHelper.GenerateContentUrl(Url, context.HttpContext);

            JavaScriptResult result = new JavaScriptResult()
            {
                Script = "window.location='" + destinationUrl + "';"
            };
            result.ExecuteResult(context);
        }
        else
            base.ExecuteResult(context);
    }
}

Now you can use the controller’s Redirect() function as usual…and it will automatically detect if it needs to perform a 302 redirect or an Ajax redirect.

Cheers!