Question

In my AJAX call, I want to return a string value back to the calling page.

Should I use ActionResult or just return a string?

Answer 1

You can just use the ContentResult to return a plain string:

public ActionResult Temp() {     return Content('Hi there!'); } 

ContentResult by default returns a text/plain as its contentType. This is overloadable so you can also do:

return Content('<xml>This is poorly formatted xml.</xml>', 'text/xml');