Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

Advanced Controllers

As the workhorse of the ASP.NET MVC stack, it's no surprise that the controller has a lot of advanced features that were way beyond the scope of Chapter 2. In this section, you'll learn both how the controller internals work and how you can use it in some advanced scenarios.

Defining the Controller: The IController Interface

Now that you have the basics down, we'll take a more structured look at exactly how controllers are defined and used. Up to this point, we've kept thing simple by focusing on what a controller does; now it's time to look at what a controller is. To do that, you'll need to understand the IController interface. As discussed in Chapter 1, among the core focuses of ASP.NET MVC are extensibility and flexibility. When building software this way, it's important to leverage abstraction as much as possible by using interfaces.

For a class to be a controller in ASP.NET MVC, it must at minimum implement the IController interface, and by convention the name of the class must end with the suffix Controller. The naming convention is actually quite important — and you'll find that many of these small rules are in play with ASP.NET MVC, which will make your life just a little bit easier by not making you define configuration settings and attributes. Ironically, the IController interface is quite simple given the power it is abstracting:

public interface IController {    void Execute(RequestContext requestContext);}

It's a simple process really: When a request ...