12.3. Producing Output

After a controller has finished processing a request, it usually needs to generate a response. When we created our bare-metal controller by implementing the IController interface directly, we needed to take responsibility for every aspect of processing a request, including generating the response to the client. If we want to send an HTML response, for example, then we must create and assemble the HTML data and send it to the client using the Response.Write method. Similarly, if we want to redirect the user's browser to another URL, we need to call the Response.Redirect method and pass the URL we are interested in directly. Both of these approaches are shown in Listing 12-7.

Example 12.7. Generating Results in an IController Implementation

using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;

namespace ControllersAndActions.Controllers {

    public class BasicController : IController {

public void Execute(RequestContext requestContext) {

            string controller = (string)requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"];
            string action = (string)requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"];

            requestContext.HttpContext.Response.Write(
                string.Format("Controller: {0}, Action: {1}", controller, action));

            // ... or ...

            requestContext.HttpContext.Response.Redirect("/Some/Other/Url");
        }
    }
}