ASP.NET Core 2.0 URL

Question

I'm developing a large ASP.NET Core 2 web application but I still get confused with URLs.

When fist learning, I thought URL's took on the name of the View, but discovered they come from the Controller method.

Here is an example to convey my issue:

I have a controller method named Daysheet , which returns a view and model with the same name.

In the Daysheet view, I call various controller methods from Javascript to perform specific actions. One of them is called AssignStaff which takes two integer parameters.

In the AssignStaff method I again return the Daysheet view with model, but now my URL is "AssignStaff"!

I can't just do a redirect because the whole Daysheet model is not being passed to the AssignStaff method.

I have many situations like this where after calling an action, I end up with another URL that I don't want.

UPDATE/EDIT

Thanks for assistance and apologies if my explanation is confusing. I simply have a view called Daysheet that uses a model. I want to call various controller methods to perform various actions, but I want to stay on the "Daysheet" view/URL.

As mentioned, I can't just redirect because in the action method I no longer have the whole model from the Daysheet view. Also, if I redirect I can't pass the whole model because that causes an error saying the header is too long. I think my only choice may be to use ajax for the actions so that the URL doesn't change.

Answer 1

When you just do Return View("") name in a Controller Action, the URL will be the name of the Action you are using.

If you want to redirect to some specific Action, that will help to make sure the Url matches to where you are. You might want to read more about it here .

To do so, use:

RedirectToAction()

Answer 2

The URLs your application responds to are called "routes", and they are either created by convention or explicitly. The default is by convention, of course, which is a URL in the form of /{controller=Home}/{action=Index} . Index is the default action if that portion of the route is left off, so a request to /foo will by convention map to FooController.Index . HomeController is the default controller, so an empty path (eg http://sample.com ) will by convention invoke HomeController.Index .

Razor Pages have their own conventions. These do somewhat follow the file system, but exclude the Pages part of the path. So a Razor Page like Pages/Foo/MyRazorPage.cshtml , will load up under /Foo/MyRazorPage .

There there is the Route attribute, which allows you to specify a totally custom route. This attribute can be applied to a controller class and individual actions in the class. For example:

[Route("foo")]
public class MyAwesomeController
{
    [Route("bar")]
    public IActionResult MyAwesomeAction()
    {
        return View();
    }
}

With that, a request to /foo/bar will actually invoke MyAwesomeController.MyAwesomeAction .