Question

Currently I have a Controller, AssetController, that has methods for navigating a tree of assets.

I use this controller to navigate a “gallery” of assets and the controller methods currently return ViewResult.

I am starting to build another way of viewing this same data which will make use of ajax and will not want ViewResult returned but rather JsonResult.

I would like to re-use as much of my controller logic as possible. I can think of two options here:

1. Change all my controller methods to return only JsonResult then change my current View to use the json to display the full page.

   Drawbacks: This pushes more page loading / redirecting logic onto the client. It also make deep linking a problem I think. With full views the URL’s of pages are very “link friendly” in that a user can copy and paste a link and pass it to someone and it will go where they expect. Returning JsonResults mean the URL doesn’t change so deep linking becomes more challenging

2. Refactor my current controller so that “shared” code is moved into private methods in the controller. Create new actions that return JsonResult and keep existing methods that return ViewResult.

   This is currently my choice as it seems to keep more code in the controller which makes unit testing it easier. But it also seems to be a little too coupled to the UI, what happens when I want to return the data in different formats, do I just keep adding new controller actions with different ActionResult types? Is that so bad?

Is there a smarter way to handle situation or is one of my approaches more favorable than the other?

UPDATE

Here is some code examples to clarify:

Currently I have this:

public ActionResult ViewObject(PathModel inPath)
{
    using (engine)
    {
      var metaData = engine.GetFileMetaData(inPath.Path);
  return View(metaData); //This is returning a ViewResult type
    }
}

I am thinking about doing something like this

private FileMetaDataModel ViewObjectInternal(PathModel inPath)
{               
  using (engine)
  {
      var metaData = engine.GetFileMetaData(inPath.Path);
      return metaData;
  }
}

public ActionResult ViewObjectAsJSON(PathModel inPath)
{
   var jsonResult = new JsonResult();
   jsonResult.Data = ViewObjectInternal(inPath).ToJson();

   return jsonResult // this is returning my data as JSON;
}

public ActionResult ViewObjectAsView(PathModel inPath)
{
  return View(engine.GetFileMetaData(inPath.Path)); //This is returning a ViewResult type
}

Answer 1

Why not just simply return ActionResult?

public ActionResult Detail()
{
    // controller logic here

    if (Request.IsAjaxRequest())
        return Json(model);

    return View(model);    
}