Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

The Controller's Role

It's probably best to start out with a definition and then dive into detail from there. Keep this definition in the back of your mind as you read this chapter, because it helps to ground the discussion ahead with what a controller is all about and what it's supposed to do.

You might want to remember a quick definition: Controllers within the MVC pattern are responsible for responding to user input, often making changes to the model in response to user input. In this way, controllers in the MVC pattern are concerned with the flow of the application, working with data coming in, and providing data going out to the relevant view.

Web servers way back in the day served up HTML stored in static files on disk. As dynamic web pages gained prominence, web servers served HTML generated on-the-fly from dynamic scripts that were also located on disk. With MVC, it's a little different. The URL tells the routing mechanism (which you'll get into in Chapter 4) which controller to instantiate and which action method to call, and supplies the required arguments to that method. The controller's method then decides which view to use, and that view then does the rendering.

Rather than having a direct relationship between the URL and a file living on the web server's hard drive, there is a relationship between the URL and a method on a controller class. ASP.NET MVC implements the front controller variant of the MVC pattern, and the controller sits in front of everything except ...