ASP.net MVC Controller Actions and Web Methods

Question

I am in an ongoing discussion about what is the best terminology to use in regards to what I call "Controller actions" In particular we are talking about controller action that accept a 'POST' verbs only. A colleague of mine prefers to call them "Web Methods", I suspect this is becuase of the old days of Web Services. The behaviour is similar in some ways I can see that but it does not seem right to me.

So I suppose my question is:

Is it correct to refer to a Controller action that accepts the 'POST' verb, as a Web Method?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The distinction is very unclear. How are you going to refer to a method that accepts PUT, MERGE, DELETE or other verbs (think REST)?

Here we call these "POST-action", "MERGE-action", etc. This is both close to how these method are called in the ASP.NET MVC framework and conveys addtional information on how these actions operate.

Answer 2

I can't say with authority that it's incorrect, but it's definitely confusing, as "web method" is the same term commonly used for operations on an XML (SOAP) Web Service endpoint.

I prefer to call controller actions... actions. Different actions may respond to different verbs.