Question

I have a registration form in the side bar of my web application. When the user submits the entered data, the user should be redirected to another page with a more complete registration form when he can fill the rest of the data. The data that was entered by the user in the first form should be already there in the second form, but that’s not happening… I checked to see the value of the view model I’m passing to the second action method and it was null and in the browser’s address bar I get:

http://localhost:2732/User/RegisterPage?model=Sharwe.MVC.ViewModels.RegisterPageViewModel

Here’s the code:

    public ActionResult Register()
    {
        return PartialView(new RegisterViewModel());
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Register(RegisterViewModel dto)
    {
        var model = Mapper.Map<RegisterViewModel, RegisterPageViewModel>(dto);
        return RedirectToAction("RegisterPage", "User", new { viewModel = model });
    }

    public ActionResult RegisterPage(RegisterPageViewModel viewModel)
    {
        return View(viewModel);
    }

Isn’t that the way to do this? Or am I missing something here…?

Answer 1

The Dictionary passed to RedirectToAction() is the Route Value not the View Model. And RedirectToAction() is basically telling the browser to go to a certain URL. Browser by default makes the GET request and obviously you lose your data.

For this, you need to use TempData dictionary. You can store view model in TempData and then RedirectToAction() to RegisterPage. TempData saves the data for only 1 request span and would delete it automatically. It’s ideal for this scenario.

See this for more details > The value for a object inside a viewmodel lost on redirect to action in asp.net mvc 2.0?