Creating a Simple Application Using MVC 4.0

Now let's add a view for our model so we will select a strongly-typed view and select our model class. You will see a list of scaffold templates available. Since we are creating this view to add a new user we will select the Create option.

The moment we click on Add, the following is the cshtml created for the view.

We will see the view has all the fields set in the model along with the validations applied to it.

Now let's add a controller for our view. Right-click on the controller folder and name our controller "User", select Empty MVC controller and Add.

By default, our controller contains an Index method. Right-click on the index method and add a view for this. The Index method can be used to show the list of users available. So we can select the scaffold template type as a list.

Once the view is added for Index and UserAdd, we have to define its get and post methods in the controller. By default, it always gets, if we want a post method we have to define [httppost] before the method declaration.

HttpGet,will render the form and HttpPost will post the form data. For example, we need to add a new user. First, we need the form to add a user, that is get and when we fill the form with values; we need to post those values so that they can be saved for further access.

Look at our controller structure, it contains two get methods, one to get the list of users (Index) and another to get the UserAdd form, and with the same name it contains its post method.

• ActionResult: An action result represents a command that the framework will perform on behalf of the action method. The ActionResult& class is the base class for action results. Common return Type.
• ContentResult: This can be used to return plain text or user-defined content type.

  public ContentResult Test()
  {
      return Content("This is my test data");
  }
  

• JsonResult: Used to return JSON, mainly used for Ajax requests.

  public JsonResult Test()
  {
      return Json("This is my test json data");
  }
  

• PartialViewResul: The PartialViewResult class is inherited from the abstract "ViewResultBase" class and is used to render a partial view.

  public PartialViewResult Test()
  {
      return PartialView("Result");
  }
  

• ViewResult: It renders a specified view.

  public ViewResult Test()
  {
      return View("Result");
  }
  

• FileResult: It is used when we want to return the binary content/file as an output.
• RedirectToRouteResult: It is used when we want to redirect to another action method.
• JavaScriptResult: We can use this type if we want our action method to return a script that can be executed on the client side.

Three new types are supported by MVC 3

1. HttpNotFound: This returns a 404 error on the client side. It can be useful in situations where the resource is not available and we want to display a 404.
2. RedirectResult: It can be a temporary or permanent return code 302 depending upon the boolean flag. Can be used to redirect to the given URL.
3. HttpStatusCodeReturn: It can be used when the user wants the choice of error code to be returned from the action method. It can be any code.

Routing with MVC

MVC gives great flexibility for adding user-friendly URLs. Routings are defined under the class RouteConfig. By default, one route is already defined.

The MVC routing pattern includes "{controller}" and "{action}" placeholders. For more details on routing please refer to this link.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668201.aspx

This is how our index page will appear with the URL.

the UserAdd method, here the controller is User and the Action is UserAdd.

Points of Interest

Are you keen on learning MVC 4.0 new features? Let's learn to build a simple application then we can move ahead with advanced features.