Help with mapping ActionLinks to Methods in Controllers (ASP.NET MVC2)

Question

I'm on my first MVC project and still haven't got a complete hang of it. I ran into this issue:

I have this in my View (Home/Index.aspx)

<% using (Html.BeginForm()) { %>
<fieldset>
<p>
    <%: Html.TextBox("A")%> 
    <%: Html.TextBox("B") %>
    <%: Html.ActionLink("Submit", "Create", "Home")%> 
</p>
</fieldset>
<% } %>

I have this in my Controller (Controllers/HomeController.cs)

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Create(FormCollection formValues)
{
    return View("Index");
}

I haven't changed the default routes in global.asx

When I hit submit, I get the "The resource cannot be found error". However, if I change the ActionLink to

<input type="submit" value="Save" />

and the method in the controller to:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
 public ActionResult Index(FormCollection formValues)
 {
     return View("Index");
 }

it works fine.

I'm a little confused because if I'm specifying the exact action method name and the controller in the ActionLink (<%: Html.ActionLink("Submit", "Create", "Home")%> ), why would it matter whether I name this method Create or Index?

Answer 1

You have [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] which restricts it to HTTP POST requests. Since an action link is a GET, it's not using your method. Presumably you have two Index methods, one of which doesn't have that attribute and accepts GET requests.