Custom controller being overwritten by IoC

Question

I have a simple Sitecore controller that returns an list of items from Sitecore. It's used it in a custom SPEAK UI page.

This works fine in my local dev environment but when I deploy it into an Sitecore environment (which has Castle Windsor setup as an IoC) my controller no longer works. The error in the logs is: 'Could not create controller':

public class MyListBrowsingController : Controller
{
    public JsonResult GetItems()
    {
        var myList = //get list here
        return Json(myList, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
    }

}

As I understand it the problem is that CastleWindsor is wired up via a pipeline and is overwritten the default Sitecore Dependency Resolver, e.g like so:

https://bitlush.com/blog/using-castle-windsor-with-sitecore-mvc-for-dependency-injection

I know ideally this would be solved with a fall-back like so: https://github.com/HedgehogDevelopment/sitecore-chained-dependency-resolver/blob/master/InversionOfControl.CastleWindsor/Pipelines/SetupDependencyResolvers.cs.

However unfortunately I don't have access / control of this code as it's in a separate dll so id like to explicitly register the route in some other way which won't get overwritten by an IoC.

Is there a way to do this?

Further info:

• Sitecore 7.5 > 8.1

Answer 1

For anyone coming across this here is what I did.

If you have a DI configured it resets any routes registered after you've added them so you need to register them in the initialize Pipeline like so:

Create a pipeline to register your route:

public class RegisterMySampleRoute
{
    public virtual void Process(PipelineArgs args)
    {
        RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute("my_sample_route", 
            "mysample/api/{controller}/{action}", 
            new {controller = "SampleController"}
        );
    }
}

Then patch it in like so:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
    <sitecore>
        <pipelines>
            <initialize>
                <processor type="MyNamespace.Pipelines.RegisterMySampleRoute, MyNamespace" patch:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Mvc.Pipelines.Loader.InitializeRoutes, Sitecore.Mvc']" />
            </initialize>
        </pipelines>
    </sitecore>
</configuration>

You should then find your custom routes will work as expected.