Question

This is not that important, but I’m getting conflicting information about this so I thought of ask here.

Let’s say I have a simple Controller and I want to pass the Model to the View. Most of the time I see it like this:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Foo() {
    var bar = new SomeModel() {
        Id = 1,
        Name = "John Dork",
        Email = "[e-mail]"
    };
    ViewData.Model = bar;
    return View();
}

Or like this:

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Foo() {
    var bar = new SomeModel() {
        Id = 1,
        Name = "John Dork",
        Email = "[e-mail]"
    };
    return View(bar);
}

Questions: Although I’m not aware of a difference between these two ways of sending this data to the view, is there in fact a difference? And what is different about them? What would be the “correct” way of doing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

They are equivalent. In the MVC source code, View(object) is defined as:

    protected internal ViewResult View(object model)
    {
        return View(null /* viewName */, null /* masterName */, model);
    }

Which in turns calls:

    protected internal virtual ViewResult View(string viewName, string masterName, object model)
    {
        if (model != null)
        {
            ViewData.Model = model;
        }

        return new ViewResult
        {
            ViewName = viewName,
            MasterName = masterName,
            ViewData = ViewData,
            TempData = TempData,
            ViewEngineCollection = ViewEngineCollection
        };
    }

And you can see that it just sets ViewData.Model.

There’s no “correct” way of doing it, but I feel that the second approach (i.e., not using ViewData.Model) is more fluent and pleasing.