Strong Typed Response.Redirect

Few days ago, I was looking for a good way to replace all the ugly Response.Redirect(“page.apx”) with a strong typed version in all the web site. First thing I did (as a good developer should always do) was I was looking on internet for a best practice/good way to achieve this behaviour but I could not find a good solution: most of the posts I found were talking about creating kind of base class… etc. but as soon as I read “BaseClass”, I stopped reading because it meant I had to refactor all the code to use the new base class. Anyway let us go straight to the point.

Using the extensions method I have done, you can now do something like the below:

Response.Redirect<MyPage>();

The good point is it works even if the page has got a different name from the base class (code behind) even if it is not very common. What I’m saying is the extension method will work even in the case below.

Let's say I want to redirect to MyNicePage.aspx.

Suppose the page code behind class has got a different name(it should be Class MyNicePage{}).

partial class MyPage{...}

I will able to do:

Response.Redirect<MyPage>();

and it will redirect to MyNicePage.aspx.

Let’s have a look at the code:

First of all, you need to create an extension method for the Page class which returns the page name by page Type:

using System;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Linq;
public static class PageReferenceExtensions
{
    public static string GetPageName(this Page page)
    {
        var pageClassType=GetPageClassType(page);
        var pageName=GetPageNameByPageClassType(pageClassType);
        return pageName;
    }

    private static Type GetPageClassType(Page page)
    {
        //don't convert the below using a Linq expression!
        //Linq is a lot slower than the classic foreach
        var types = page.GetType().Assembly.GetTypes();
        foreach (var type in types)
        {
            if (type.IsSubclassOf(page.GetType()))
            {
                return type;
            }
        }
        return null;
    }

    private static string GetPageNameByPageClassType(Type t)
    {
        //the below can be improved
        var pageNameToListString= t.Name.Split('_').ToList();
        var pageExtension = pageNameToListString.Last();
        pageNameToListString.Remove(pageExtension);
        var pageName = pageNameToListString[pageNameToListString.Count - 1];
        pageNameToListString.Remove(pageName);
        var pagePath = string.Join("/", pageNameToListString);
        return pagePath + "/" + pageName + "." + pageExtension;
    }
}

Then, you need to create the extension method for HttpResponse class as below:

using System.Web;
   using System.Web.UI;

   public static class HttpResponseExtension
   {
      public static void Redirect<T>(this HttpResponse response) where T : Page, new()
      {
          string pageName = GetPageName<T>();
          response.Redirect("~/" + pageName);
      }

      private static string GetPageName<T>() where T : Page, new()
       {
           var page = new T();
           return page.GetPageName();
       }

       public static void Redirect<T>(this HttpResponse response, string queryString) where T : Page, new()
       {
           string pageName = GetPageName<T>();
           response.Redirect("~/" + pageName + queryString);
       }
   }

As you can see, there is also an overload that takes the query string.

You could use this method to create extension methods for the “Server.Transfer” which performance wise is faster.