Conditional RedirectToAction in Controller? - asp.net-mvc

Question

I'm just wondering where, in MVC, the responsibility for determining where to redirect belongs. I think it's the controller, but I'm not sure.
In the Create action of a WorkshopItem I'm creating a new WorkshopItem from the ViewModel passed in, then saving it to the database. Part of the ViewModel is a SelectedCustomerId and CustomerName, if the SelectedCustomerId is empty and the name is empty I get the default customer entity and associate it with the item. If the Id is empty but the name is not then the user has searched for a customer but no matches were found, so I take the value and create a new customer record and attach it.
[NHibernateActionFilter]
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(WorkshopItemCreateViewModel model)
{
try
{
Customer customer = null;
if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() &&
!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName))
customer = CreateNewCustomer(model.CustomerName);
else if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() &&
string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName))
{
// Assign the System Valued customer if no customer was selected.
var id = Guid.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ValuedCustomerId"]);
customer = Session.QueryOver<Customer>()
.Where(c => c.Id == id)
.SingleOrDefault();
}
// other stuff
return RedirectToAction("Index");
This is working fine, but now I want to also RedirectToAction depending on whether a customer record was created or not because if a customer was created it only has a Name and I'd like to redirect to the Edit action on the Customer Controller passing the CustomerId (which I think I can do). My question is really whether this is valid to do in MVC or should this be a responsibility elsewhere?
This would look like this:
[NHibernateActionFilter]
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(WorkshopItemCreateViewModel model)
{
try
{
Customer customer = null;
bool newCustomer = false;
if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() &&
!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName))
{
customer = CreateNewCustomer(model.CustomerName);
newCustomer = true;
}
else if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() &&
string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName))
{
// Assign the System Valued customer if no customer was selected.
var id = Guid.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ValuedCustomerId"]);
customer = Session.QueryOver<Customer>()
.Where(c => c.Id == id)
.SingleOrDefault();
}
// other stuff
if (newCustomer)
return RedirectToAction("Edit", "Customer", new {id=customer.Id});
else
return RedirectToAction("Index");

Answer 1

Absolutely, the controller maintains responsibility of returning content and redirecting to the appropriate actions. You can think of the controller as almost a traffic cop, directing things where to go and sending the right stuff to the appropriate places. An example from your code above might look something like this:
if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() && !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName))
customer = CreateNewCustomer(model.CustomerName);
return RedirectToAction("Edit", new {id = customer.Id});
else if (model.SelectedCustomerId == new Guid() && string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(model.CustomerName)){
// Assign the System Valued customer if no customer was selected.
var id = Guid.Parse(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ValuedCustomerId"]);
customer = Session.QueryOver<Customer>().Where(c => c.Id == id).SingleOrDefault();
return RedirectToAction("SomeOtherMethod");
}
// other stuff
return RedirectToAction("Index");