MVC stands for model-view-controller. MVC is a pattern for developing applications that are well architected, testable and easy to maintain. MVC-based applications contain:
- M odels: Classes that represent the data of the application and that use validation logic to enforce business rules for that data.
- V iews: Template files that your application uses to dynamically generate HTML responses.
- C ontrollers: Classes that handle incoming browser requests, retrieve model data, and then specify view templates that return a response to the browser.
About ASP.NET MVC: It gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over markup for enjoyable, agile development. ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast, TDD-friendly development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards.
Controller classes are invoked in response to an incoming URL request. A controller class is where you write the code that handles the incoming browser requests, retrieves data from a database, and ultimately decides what type of response to send back to the browser. View templates can then be used from a controller to generate and format an HTML response to the browser.
A view template should never perform business logic or interact with a database directly. Instead, a view template should work only with the data that's provided to it by the controller. Maintaining this "separation of concerns" helps keep your code clean, testable and more maintainable.
ASP.NET MVC invokes different controller classes (and different action methods within them) depending on the incoming URL. The default URL routing logic used by ASP.NET MVC uses a format like this to determine what code to invoke:
/[Controller]/[ActionName]/[Parameters]You set the format for routing in the App_Start/RouteConfig.cs file.