ASP.NET MVC Controller Lifecycle

Question

It\'s my understanding that the constructor for a controller is not called during each web request. Assuming this is true, what is the lifecycle of a controller? Is is \"con

Answer 1

I'm afraid, your understanding is wrong. A controller (which should be a very thin and lightweight class and must not have any session-outliving state) is actually constructed on the fly for each and every web request. How else could a controller instance be specific to a certain view?

So there is no such thing as a "lifecycle" (other than that of the request)...

Answer 2

If you use the default controller factory a new instance will be constructed for each request and that's the way it should be. Controllers shouldn't be shared among different requests. You could though write a custom factory that manages the lifetime of the controllers.

Answer 3

A controller is created for every request you do. Lets take an example.

   public class ExampleController : Controller{
           public static userName;

            public void Action1(){//do stuff}
            public void Action2(){//do stuff}
            public void AssignUserName(string username){
                 userName = username;

            }
           public string GetName(){ return userName;}


   }

Now you can call the controller from the view passing a username. Don't hope to get the userName you set in the next request. it will return null. Thus for every request a new controller is created. You don't instantiate a controller anywhere in MVC like you instatiate an object from a class. Simply you don't have controller object memory pointer to call it as you do with other objects.

Go to this link. There is a good explanation on lifecycle of MVC controller.

ASP.Net MVC - Request Life Cycle