actionresult

Being new to ASP.NET MVC, I've been wondering about the signature of Controller methods. In all the examples I've seen, they always seem to return ActionResult, even if they actually return a ViewResult instance or similar. Here's a commonly seen example: public ActionResult Index() { return this.View(); } In such a case, wouldn't it make more sense to declare the method as public ViewResult Index() , and get stronger type support? Experimentation indicates that this works, so it seems possible. I do realize that there may be situations where the polymorphism is desired (e.g. if you want to

I'm using jQuery to make an Ajax call using an Http Post in ASP.NET MVC. I would like to be able to pass a Dictionary of values. The closest thing I could think of was to pass in a multi-dimensional array of strings, but the result that actually gets passed to the ActionResult method is a single dimensional string array containing a string concatenation of the "key/value" pair. For instance the first item in the below "values" array contains the below value: "id,200" Here's an example of my ActionResult method: public ActionResult AddItems(string[] values) { // do something } Here's an example

I am creating an ActionResult in ASP.Net MVC to serve images. With Session state enabled, IIS will only handle one request at a time from the same user. (This is true not just in MVC.) Therefore, on a page with multiple images calling back to this Action, only one image request can be handled at a time. It's synchronous. I'd like this image Action to be asynchronous -- I'd like multiple image requests to each execute without needing the previous one to complete. (If the images were just static files, IIS would serve them up this way.) So, I'd like to disable Session just for calls to that

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? swilliams 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"); You can also just return string if you know that's the only thing the method will ever return. For example: public string MyActionName() { return "Hi there!"; }