The RedirectToAction allows a controller to do an HTTP redirection to an alternative action. This is essentially the MVC equivalent of just doing a Response.Redirect in ASP.NET.

Unfortunately the signature of RedirectToAction looks a little something like:

  RedirectToRouteResult RedirectToAction(string actionName, string controllerName, object values)

This is unfortunate because you are left hard coding your controller and action names as string literals. With modern refactoring tools it would be very easy to break such code. In Scott’s latest video on MVC he discusses using lambdas to decouple link creation, so I figured it was only nature that the MVC framework support a similar concept for redirecting to another action.

As it turns out the framework does not support that, and apparently Matt Hawley experienced the same disappointment. But fortunately he created a wonderful extension method that adds lambda expression support to the RedirectToAction method.

You can read about it, and download the code at http://blog.eworldui.net/post/2008/05/ASPNET-MVC-Expression-Based-RedirectToAction-Method.aspx