Accessing the Request object inside a Tag Helper in ASP.NET Core

Published: 31 May 2016

Last week I was doing a little experiment which involved writing a Tag Helper. For this Tag Helper I had to access the actual URL for the request, so I therefore had to somehow get a hold of the HttpRequest inside of the Tag Helper.

Injecting IHttpContextAccessor

The Request is not available as a property of the TagHelper base class so I figured that I needed to inject IHttpContextAccessor into my Tag Helper’s constructor, for example:

public class LockTagHelper : TagHelper
{
    private readonly IHttpContextAccessor _contextAccessor;
    
    public LockTagHelper(IHttpContextAccessor contextAccessor)
    {
        _contextAccessor = contextAccessor;
    }
}

The Request can then later be accessed as follows:

var request = _contextAccessor.HttpContext.Request;

On my first try I got the following exception:

InvalidOperationException: Unable to resolve service for type ‘Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.IHttpContextAccessor’ while attempting to activate ‘Auth0.AspNetCore.Mvc.TagHelpers.LockTagHelper’.

I know this worked before when I used ASP.NET Core (then still called ASP.NET 5) last year, and after a bit of research it seemed that the default behaviour has changed and you now had to configure IHttpContextAccessor manually with the DI framework.

So inside the ConfigureServices method of your Startup class, simple add the following line.

services.AddSingleton<IHttpContextAccessor, HttpContextAccessor>();

This worked great but it posed a problem for me. This particular Tag Helper would be available as a NuGet package and I did not want to expect users to have to configure IHttpContextAccessor with the DI in order for my Tag Helper to work correctly.

Using ViewContextAttribute

I needed a way which was less error prone, and after posing the question on GitHub, Pranav supplied a much better solution..

Simply declare a property of type ViewContext and decorate it with the [ViewContext] attribute.

You can then access the HttpRequest through the ViewContext.HttpContext.Request property.

public class LockTagHelper : TagHelper
{
    protected HttpRequest Request => ViewContext.HttpContext.Request;
    protected HttpResponse Response => ViewContext.HttpContext.Response;

    [ViewContext]
    public ViewContext ViewContext { get; set; }

    // Code omitted for brevity
}

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