flipbit

During my recent exploration of the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework I hit a roadblock when posting data back from the browser using a form. The scenario involved was as basic as you could imagine, a simple HTML form posting back an Id to a controller:

public class JobController : Controller
    {
        public IJobService JobService { get; set; }

        public ActionResult Load(int id)
        {
            ViewData["Job"] = JobService.Load(id);

            return RedirectToAction("ViewJob");
        }
    }

The issue I was having was that my controller wasn’t picking up the Id value. Changing the code to use the request object solved the problem:

public class JobController : Controller
    {
        public IJobService JobService { get; set; }

        public ActionResult Load()
        {
            var id = int.Parse(Request.Form["id"]);

            ViewData["Job"] = JobService.Load(id);

            return RedirectToAction("ViewJob");
        }
    }

However, this solution was far from satisfactory. By chance I stumbled across a blog post that was explaining the same issue, caused by the default routing taking precedence over request values. Removing the Id from the rule solved the problem.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

            routes.MapRoute(
                "Default",                                     // Route name
                "{controller}/{action}",                       // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" }  // Parameter defaults
            );
        }

Or not. Now the code worked perfectly for the first request, however when the value was changed on subsequent requests, the original value was still retained by the controller. After much searching, I finally found the solution on Stack Overflow. I needed to configure my IoC container (Windsor) to use a transient lifestyle, as the controller wasn’t being destroyed between requests.

        ${JobService}

This is how the Monorail controller facility in Windsor behaves be default out of the box; I could quite fathom why the MVC Contrib integration would not do so as well. One to chalk up to experience…