Question

Can I do something similar to this in a way that doesn’t throw an error:

public class AdsController : Controller
{
  AdsRepository repo = new AdsRepository();

  public ActionResult Details(string id)
  {
    AdSlots adslot = new AdSlots();
    Enum.TryParse(id, true, out adslot);
    return Content(repo.GetInvocationCode(adslot, Global.SiteInfo.ID));
  }

  [ChildActionOnly]
  public ActionResult Details(AdSlots slot)
  {
    return Content(repo.GetInvocationCode(slot, Global.SiteInfo.ID));
  }

}

The point is that I want to have a way of accessing the resource through /ads/details/leaderboard as a url in the browser, but also in master pages using:

 <% Html.RenderAction("Details", "Ads", new {slot = AdSlots.Leaderboard }); %>

I just think that is cleaner than:

 <% Html.RenderAction("Details", "Ads", new {slot = "Leaderboard" }); %>

If I do as above and call the url /ads/details/leaderboard I get this error:

The current request for action ‘Details’ on controller type ‘AdsController’ is ambiguous between the following action methods.. etc

I didn’t think I would get that error as I have given the attribute [ChildActionOnly] to the other action. I would think then it was obvious for the system that if I access it through the browser I would only have one option, not so apparently.

Answer 1

Maybe not the nicest, but
<% Html.RenderAction("Details", "Ads", new {id = AdSlots.Leaderboard.ToString() }); %>
should always result in the first action… And since the problem being that MVC calls a ToString() on your enum ANYWAY, so you could just leave out the second controller action alltogether, and then your problem might go away… Parsing an enum is not that expensive…