CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvccode-organization
Edwin Jarvis
Edwin Jarvis

Reputation: 6120

Why are the controllers on ASP.NET MVC name-based?

In ASP.NET MVC, we're required to use the suffix "Controller" for all controllers. This seems unnecessarily restrictive - is there a technical reason for it?

I'm mostly just curious, but can see situations where more flexible naming rules could improve code organization. Couldn't the discovery of possible controller classes be easily made using reflection to search for Controller derived classes? Or require that controller classes be marked with a ControllerAttribute?

Upvotes: 7

Views: 467

Answers (2)

Haacked
Haacked

Reputation: 59001

One of the benefits of this convention is that it's common to have a URL segment, controller, and a model class all have the same name.

URL: /product/ Controller: Product : Controller Model: Product

This would cause a naming conflict. So we made a convention to have controller names suffixed with "Controller" to avoid this conflict. However, you can override this behavior via our extensibility APIs.

Upvotes: 4

Jacob Carpenter
Jacob Carpenter

Reputation: 4132

The MVC community is heavily influenced by Ruby on Rails, which values "convention over configuration". By just naming things consistently, the application can run with zero configuration.

Upvotes: 14

Related Questions