HTTPGet And HTTPPost Attributes In ASP.NET MVC

HttpGet and HttpPost are both the methods of posting client data or form data to the server. HTTP is a HyperText Transfer Protocol that is designed to send and receive the data between client and server using web pages.

HTTPGET and HTTPPOST attributes encode request parameters as key and value pairs in the HTTP request.

The HttpGet protocol and the HttpPost protocol provide backward compatibility.

Find the below example. You may want two versions of the Search method, one that renders the Search form and the other that handles the request when that form is posted.


Whenever the POST request for /Values/Search is received, the action invoker creates a list of all methods of the Controller that match the Search action name. In this case, you would end up with a list of two methods. Immediately, the invoker looks at all of the ActionSelectorAttribute instances applied to each method and calls the IsValidForRequest method on each. If each attribute returns true, then the method is considered valid for the current action.

Let us consider one case; when you ask the first method if it can handle a POST request, it will respond with false because it only handles GET requests. The second method responds with true because it can handle the POST request, and it is the one selected to handle the action for post request.

While doing this action, no method is found that meets these criteria, the invoker will call the HandleUnknownAction method on the Controller, supplying the name of the missing action. If more than one action method meeting these criteria is found, an InvalidOperationException is thrown.