I currently have a abstract controller class that I all my controllers inherit from. In my master page I want to be able to access some data that will be in Session and also the currently user (IPrinciple). I read that I could use the contructor of by abstract base controller class, that is I could do something like

public BaseController()
    {
        ViewData["SomeData"] = Session["SomeData"];
        ViewData["UserName"] = this.User.Identity.Name;
    }

I could then access ViewData["UserName"] etc from my master page. My problem is that both Session and User are null at this point. Does anybody know of a different approach?

Thanks in advance.