Action Result Return Type in MVC 5.0

Introduction

This article does an overview of Action Result return type in MVC. I will be discussing about the various derived types of Action Result abstract class which helps to return result in several ways and when will be used what type of derived action result type with an examples.

Background

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller.  It's a way of designing an application that separates data access, business logic and the graphical user interface. The goal is to make the application more maintainable.

In Brief, It can be described as follows:

Model:  It represents the core business logic and data

View:  The view is only responsible for representing the GUI by transforming a model(s).

Controller:  It controls the application logic and also it provides the coordination between the view and models.

The communication between Controller to View to return any data, model, file and view etc will be performed through the Action Result abstract class as a return type.

About Action Result

The controller you can create an action method that returns such as an integer or string or any object type. These return types can be maintained in an appropriate way by defining ActionResult as return type. There are many derived Action Result types in MVC that may use to return the results from controller method to view.

Those are:

ViewResult	FileResult	RedirectResult	HttpStatusCodeResult
PartialViewResult	FileContentResult	RedirectToRouteResult	HttpUnAuthorizedResult
JsonResult	FilePathResult	JavaScriptResult	HttpNotFoundResult
ContentResult	FileStreamResult	EmptyResult

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