Question

I have an ASP MVC3 application that has several HttpPost ActionResult methods. During a debug session, the methods work fine. But when I publish and view the web app in the browser only the HttpPost methods fail. Firebug shows a “404 not found”. Other non-HttpPost methods in the same controller work fine.

UPDATE:

1) The published url for the app is localhost/psp.
2) All the GET actions return URLs of http://localhost/psp/‘controller’/’action’.
3) The POST actions are returning URLs of http://localhost/‘controller’/’action’.

So this seems to be a routing problem. The only route I have in my Global.asax.cs file is:

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

Note that the Home controller does NOT contain any of the HttpPost actions. All POST methods that fail are in separate controller. I’ve tried to adjust this route to: psp/{controller}/{action}/{id} but then receive a 403.14 error (FYI I am using IIS 7.5).

I’m baffled by why these HttpPost method work during debug but not in a published app. Here is one of the methods that get the 404 error after being published:

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult GetAreaSelTexResult(JSON_MapSelPars pars)
    {

        AreaSelTextResult myResult = new AreaSelTextResult();

        using (var ctx = new prismEntities())
        {
            var q = from p in ctx.pPSPMapSummary_Sel(pars.areaType, pars.areaName, null, null,pars.goalCDL) select p;

            // There should only be one record returned, so loop will iterate only once.
            foreach (var k in q)
            {
                //Move procedure results to object
                myResult.TopProjectName1 = k.TopProjectName1;
                myResult.TopProjectName2 = k.TopProjectName2;
                myResult.TopProjectName3 = k.TopProjectName3;

                myResult.TopProjectSnapshotLink1 = k.TopProjectSnapshotLink1;
                myResult.TopProjectSnapshotLink2 = k.TopProjectSnapshotLink2;
                myResult.TopProjectSnapshotLink3 = k.TopProjectSnapshotLink3;

                myResult.TotalProjectAmt = string.Format("{0:C}", k.TotalProjectAmt);
                myResult.TotalProjectCount = k.TotalProjectCount;

            }
        }

        // send object to partial view
        return PartialView("GetAreaSelTexResult", myResult);
    }

Here is the Partial View:

@model PAA.Models.AreaSelTextResult
<p>@Model.TotalProjectCount projects</p>
<p>@Model.TotalProjectAmt total</p>

<p>
   <a href="@Model.TopProjectSnapshotLink1">@Model.TopProjectName1</a></p>
<p>
   <a href="@Model.TopProjectSnapshotLink2">@Model.TopProjectName2</a></p>
<p>
   <a href="@Model.TopProjectSnapshotLink3">@Model.TopProjectName3</a></p>

And here is the javascript that calls the HttpPost method and then loads the returned partial view into a div called “returnedProjData”:

function retrieveSelectionSummary(selectionName, selectionType) {

    $('#goalList input:checked').each(function () {
        goals += $(this).attr('value') + ",";
    });

    var attr = { areaName: selectionName,
        areaType: selectionType,
                yearCDL: null,
                goalCDL: null,
                statusCDL: status
                };

    var json = JSON.stringify(attr);
    $.ajax({
        url: '/summary/GetAreaSelTexResult',
        type: 'POST',
        dataType: 'html',
        data: json,
        contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
        success: function (result) {
            $('#returnedProjData').html(result);
        },
        error: function () {
            alert("Error.");
        }
    });
    return attr;
}

Answer 1

Never hardcode urls like this:

url: '/summary/GetAreaSelTexResult',

Always use url helpers when generating urls:

url: '@Url.Action("GetAreaSelTexResult", "summary")',

The reason your code doesn’t work when you deploy it in a virtual directory is because the url /summary/GetAreaSelTexResult is no longer correct. You must take into account the virtual directory name now: /myappname/summary/GetAreaSelTexResult. For this reason you should never hardcode your urls but always use url helpers to generate them.

And if this is in a separate javascript file where you cannot use server side helpers you could define a global variable in your view that will point to the correct url or use HTML5 data-* helpers on some DOM element that you are working with.