Question

I am sending parameters to the GET ActionResult like this:

public ActionResult MyFormLetter(string studentName, string teacherName, string courseName, string appointmentDate)
{    
    // Do stuff here;
}

After clicking on a form button that calls the POST ActionResult, those values are out of scope. Ho can I retain the values in the GET ActionResult to reuse in the Post ActionResult?

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

You should be using a ViewModel for this, as well as a strongly-typed View. Something like this would work:

public class StudentInformation
{
    public string StudentName { get; set; }
    public string TeacherName { get; set; }
    public string CourseName { get; set; }
    public string AppointmentDate { get; set; }
}

Your Action methods would look like this:

public ActionResult MyFormLetter()
{
    return View();
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult MyFormLetter(StudentInformation studentInformation)
{
    // do what you like with the data passed through submitting the form

    // you will have access to the form data like this:
    //     to get student's name: studentInformation.StudentName
    //     to get teacher's name: studentInformation.TeacherName
    //     to get course's name: studentInformation.CourseName
    //     to get appointment date string: studentInformation.AppointmentDate
}

And a little View code:

@model StudentInformation


@using(Html.BeginForm())
{
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.StudentName)
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.TeacherName)
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.CourseName)
    @Html.TextBoxFor(m => m.AppointmentDate)

    <input type="submit" value="Submit Form" />
}

When you reach the Action method from the POST of the submit, you will then have access to all of that data that was input into your form view.

Disclaimer: The View code just shows the necessary elements to show how data is saved in the model for Model Binding.