Question

I have a screen to create records in MVC. If the model validates then I want to return back to my Home screen. I have seen the following:

                return new RedirectToRouteResult(
                    new RouteValueDictionary(
                        new { controller = "Access", action = "Home" }
                    )
                );

This seems rather overkill as it specifies the controller and I don’t want to change controllers. Is there a simpler way to do this?

Answer 1

The default route looks like this in global.asax:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default", // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
    new {controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional},
);

That means that the "Home" controller will be used if none has been specified (as in http://yoursite/). The default action is "Index" (as in http://yoursite/somename/).

Redirect to site home page

With this knowledge we can use RedirectToRoute to visit the home page of the site and the controller. Let’s start with the controller:

return RedirectToRoute("Default");

Redirect to default action of a controller

If we want to get to the default action for a controller, we can either use the action name directly as in:

return RedirectToAction("Index");

or specify the controller in RedirectToRoute:

return RedirectToRoute("Default", new { controller = "somename" });

But that would generate duplicated code in each controller, so let’s move the code to our BaseController instead:

public ActionResult RedirectToHome()
{
    return RedirectToRoute("Default", new { controller = RouteData.Values["controller"] });
}