Question

I’m working on my first ASP.NET MVC 3 application and I’ve got two Controllers with Views, IceCreamController/IceCreamView and RecipeController/RecipeView, and on each the user can make a selection and display the recipe.

Selection causes a PartialView to be displayed which an Edit link on it. When clicked the EditView for this recipe is displayed, allowing the user to edit the attributes of the recipe item selected.

Great. This works fine except currently the POST action in the RecipeController looks like so:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(RecipeViewModel viewModel)
{
   // updates the underlying model with the viewModel
   // other things not germane to the discussion

   return View();
}

and that ends up always showing the Index view for Recipe, which isn’t what I want. Rather, I’d like to be able to do is send the user back to the appropriate View (IceCreamView or RecipeView) when they’ve submitted their changes.

I assume that others have done something similar to this. How do you communicate which Controller/Action should be redirected to when the Edit is done?

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Note:
I added a bit above to clarify that I’ve got two separate Controllers (IceCreamController and RecipeController) and each has a View that can select and ultimately do a

@Html.Partial("_Recipe", model.recipe)

to display the details of a particular recipe. My problem is how to get the page redirected back to either IceCreamView or RecipeView by the Edit Action on RecipeController – essentially, how do I communicate where it should go since the recipe details could have been displayed by either path.

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Solution Employed:

As you can read below in the comments to Darrin’s answer, since I’ve got more than a single controller involved, a solution is to utilize the viewmodel to pass in the controller/action that should be redirected to following when the Edit post action is completed.

As I’ve got more than a single instance of this situation (arriving at an Edit page via multiple paths), I think creating a simple BaseViewModel to hold this functionality might be in order and then have all the applicable viewmodels inherit from that BaseViewModel.

I’m don’t think it needs to be anything more than something like:

public BaseViewModel
{
   public BaseViewModel(string controller, string action)
   {
      ControllerName = controller ?? string.empty;
      ActionName = action ?? string.empty;
   }

   public string ControllerName { get; set; }
   public string Action { get; set; }
}

And then a viewmodel’s constructor could just be modified to pass in the controller/action and hand that off to the base class.

There may be other solutions to this and if so, I’d like to hear them.

Answer 1

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(RecipeViewModel viewModel)
{
    // updates the underlying model with the viewModel
    // other things not germane to the discussion

    return View("IceCreamView");
}

or if you wanted to redirect you could have a controller action that would serve this view and then return RedirectToAction("IceCream"); which is probably more correct rather than directly returning a view from a POST action in case of success.