ASP.NET MVC 3 Generating an ActionLink in the controller - Html.ActionLink Equivalent

Generating routing links is extremely easy in MVC 3 using @Html.ActionLink(linkText,action,controller) when you're using Razor views this is great. However sometimes you need to generate the link within the controller - at which point you do not have direct access to the Html helper.

In these instances such as creating links for a wysiwyg editor or adding a link into an email it is preferable to have the system generate it with the appropriate protocol http/https and/or a port number if you're running locally. To this end I did some digging and put together the following little code snippet which does eactly that!

I thought I'd share it here to save me having to look it up again in the future!


            string absoluteAction = string.Format("{0}://{1}{2}",
                                                  Url.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.Scheme,
                                                  Url.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.Authority,
                                                  Url.Action("ActionName", "ControllerName", new {Id = "Data"}));