c# - MVC RedirectResult

Question

I'm new to MVC can anyone tell me what RedirectResult is used for?

I'm was wondering what is the different between this:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return new RedirectResult("http://www.google.com");
}

and this:

public RedirectResult Index()
{
    return new RedirectResult("http://www.google.com");
}

Answer 1

It is used to perform an HTTP redirect to a given url. Basically it will send the 302 status code along with the Location header in the response so that the client now issues a new HTTP request to this new location.

Usually you would use it like this instead of explicitly calling the constructor:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return Redirect("http://www.google.com");
}

As far as the difference between your two code snippets is concerned, well, it's more C# question than MVC related. In fact RedirectResult derives from ActionResult so both are valid syntaxes. Personally I prefer the first one as you could for example decide to change this redirect to return a view:

public ActionResult Index()
{
    return View();
}

and if you have explicitly specified that the return type is RedirectResult instead of ActionResult you would now have to modify it to ViewResult (probably not a big deal but it's an additional step you have to do).