So I was playing around with the Login and Sign up links in ASP.NET MVC with the Membership Provider included. I really liked it (and it was easy to understand how to use the Login feature of ASP.NET Memberships). You simply send the user to /Account/Login/?---Return path goes here---. To do this, I used this code here:
/Account/Register/?ReturnUrl=<%= HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Request.FilePath.ToString()) %>#comments
One of the issues with this is that I want the users to be able to sign up as well and be returned to the previous page. This serves many purposes. First and foremost, it’s a blog and the user may not want to navigate back to the section in which they wanted to comment OR perhaps they don’t even know. So I dove in to see if I could produce this behavior which I did with little or no problem.
Plugging in a ReturnUrl so when a user signs up for the first time, they are returned to the page in which they clicked the sign up link.
- From the page you are sending them to sign up from, put the above link into the href=”” field.
- Change Login to Register, you should now have something that looks like: (note: the #comments is specific to my application)
- <a href="/Account/Login/?ReturnUrl= <%= HttpUtility.UrlEncode(Request.FilePath.ToString()) %>#comments">Login </a>
- Then browse to your account controller and find the method Register.
- Modify the default line to bring in (string returnUrl) <- Goes inside of the currently empty parenthesis directly following the word Register.
- Insert this before the return View()… if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(returnUrl)) ViewData["ReturnUrl"] = returnUrl;
- Just below that, you should see another Register, and you will also want to tack on , string returnUrl to the end of the variables that they are already passing in.
- The below picture shows you where you will want to insert the next if statement, and then one more step
- Now navigate to Views/Account/Register.aspx and insert a hidden field (see below) somewhere inside the form tags of that page
In the above picture, the response write that you need is ViewData["ReturnUrl"].
Now test it out and you should have a fully functional (and optional) returnUrl included in your Register module. I appreciate any “Code Reviews” in the way of comments, so if you found that this was useful, please feel free to leave comments here!