Question

I am building a cms, on the edit screen for a section you can edit multiple types of pages, the urls need to remain nutral, like this:

foobar.com/edit/section/my-content-page-name
foobar.com/edit/section/my-gallery-page-name
foobar.com/edit/section/my-blog-page-name

In this scenario the Index action is used for both gets and posts.

At the moment I have one massive ViewModel, that encompasses all the data required across all page types.

I feel this is quite wrong and, makes an ugly solution for deciding what type of page update on the post.

How can I keep the Action the same but use it with different strongly type ViewModels?

Is this even possible?

public ActionResult Index(string page)
    {
        var model = _pageManager.GetSection(page, SelectedSite);
        return View(model.PageType, model);

        // renders appropriate View based on page type.

    }

    [Transaction]
    [HttpPost]
    [ValidateInput(false)]
    public ActionResult Index(SectionIndexViewModel model)
    {
        // all page types post back to same action to update content etc.
        // at this point SectionIndexViewModel is getting bloated with properties because it must cater for ALL page types data.

        var action = Request["action"] ?? "";

        // currently use this to determine what event has been triggered 
        switch (action.ToLower())
        {
         // then goes to update the appropriate page, blog or gallery
         // etc.

Answer 1

I managed to achieve this with some MVC basics that I had forgotten about.

The routing remains as per the defaults.

For each ViewModel type I delivered an extra hidden field in the form, with the type of the page/content/ViewModel eg: Content Page, or Blog Page etc.

In the Post action, I check the type of the page from this hidden field.

Then use TryUpdateModel using the expected ViewModel type for that page type.

And the rest is straight forward.

Pretty basic stuff really.