SSL Links/URLs in MVC
11 Jun 2008A couple days ago a reader sent me a question regarding how to use SSL with the MVC framework. Specifically the reader wanted to know the easiest way to make an Ajax call to a HTTPS page from a non HTTPS page. The tricky part here is to do so without hard-coding any URLs (as one of the best practices of the MVC framework is that views and controllers should be divorced from the routes that access them).
Currently an ActionLink like:
... outputs the following hyperlink:
I've created a few extension methods that enable you to fully-qualify these URLs and change the protocol to HTTPS at run-time. Using the extension method "ToSslLink" like so:
... now outputs a hyperlink with protocol, server, port, etc:
If you're using Ajax, however, you'll be more interested in getting to the URL directly rather than building an entire hyperlink. In that case you can use "ToSslUrl":
... to output this:
Here is the code for the extension methods I've created, hopefully some of you will find this useful:
One important missing element from all is this posting to a form via HTTPS from a non-HTTPS page. You can certainly create your form tags manually and populate the action attribute using Url.Action(...).ToSslUrl(), but you cannot try and combine these extension methods with the Html.Form(...) helper that is most commonly used inside a using statement.
Note: The above code was updated on July 7th, 2008 to fix a bug reported by Mike Hadlow. Thanks Mike!