Finding the current Action name from an MVC pipeline processor

Sitecore provides two pipeline hooks for tapping into an Action method at point of execution:

mvc.actionExecuting
mvc.actionExecuted

These follow standard MVC naming conventions – actionExecuting fires before your Action method executes, and actionExecuted fires afterwards.

A process hooking into actionExecuting looks something like this:

public class LogActionExecuting
{
    public void Process(ActionExecutingArgs args)
    {
        //Something here
    }
}

At this point, it might be useful to get some information about the Action we’re executing, or the Controller it belongs to. Sitecore allows us to access the MVC ActionDescriptor and ControllerDescriptor objects, which contain plenty of information about our Action and Controller.

public class LogActionExecuting
{
    public void Process(ActionExecutingArgs args)
    {
        //Some interesting items from the Action
        var actionName = args.Context.ActionDescriptor.ActionName;
        var actionAttributes = args.Context.ActionDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(false);
           
        //Some interesting items from the Controller
        var controllerName = args.Context.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.ControllerName;
        var controllerType = args.Context.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.ControllerType;
        var controllerActions = args.Context.ActionDescriptor.ControllerDescriptor.GetCanonicalActions();
 
        //args.Context.ActionDescriptor.Execute(..);
 
    }
}

The last line is commented out, as executing the action from within itself may cause the universe to implode. Maybe.

Happy hacking!