Chapter 9. Creating Global Filters

Global filters enable you to apply a consistent behavior across all requests to your web application by registering a filter during the application startup. Filters can also be applied to specific actions or entire controllers by adding an attribute to the action or controller, respectively.

Five different types of filters can be created. At the start of each web request, any filter that is defined is executed in the following order—the exception to this rule is the Exception filter (no pun intended) because these filters are only called when an error occurs:

  • Authentication filters (new in MVC 5)
  • Authorization filters
  • Action filters
  • Result filters
  • Exception filters

This chapter will provide a brief overview of all five types of filters and then will demonstrate how to create Action, Result, and Exception filters. Chapter 10 will demonstrate how to create Authentication and Authorization filters.

Authentication Filters 

Authentication filters are new to MVC 5. Prior to that, authentication and authorization were accomplished together in the Authorization filters. MVC 5 has now separated these two concerns.

When MVC receives a web page request, any Authentication filters will be executed first. If the request requires authentication and the user has previously been authenticated, the request will continue to the next step. If the user has not been authenticated, the request will halt processing. Based on the setup of the filter, the request ...

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