ASP.NET MVC - How to Preserve ModelState Errors Across RedirectToAction?

Question

I have the following two action methods (simplified for question):

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Create(string uniqueUri)
{
   // get some stuff based on uniqueuri, set in ViewData.  
   return View();
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Create(Review review)
{
   // validate review
   if (validatedOk)
   {
      return RedirectToAction("Details", new { postId = review.PostId});
   }  
   else
   {
      ModelState.AddModelError("ReviewErrors", "some error occured");
      return RedirectToAction("Create", new { uniqueUri = Request.RequestContext.RouteData.Values["uniqueUri"]});
   }   
}

So, if the validation passes, i redirect to another page (confirmation).

If an error occurs, i need to display the same page with the error.

If i do return View(), the error is displayed, but if i do return RedirectToAction (as above), it loses the Model errors.

I'm not surprised by the issue, just wondering how you guys handle this?

I could of course just return the same View instead of the redirect, but i have logic in the "Create" method which populates the view data, which i'd have to duplicate.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I had to solve this problem today myself, and came across this question.

Some of the answers are useful (using TempData), but don't really answer the question at hand.

The best advice I found was on this blog post:

http://www.jefclaes.be/2012/06/persisting-model-state-when-using-prg.html

Basically, use TempData to save and restore the ModelState object. However, it's a lot cleaner if you abstract this away into attributes.

E.g.

public class SetTempDataModelStateAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuted(ActionExecutedContext filterContext)
    {
        base.OnActionExecuted(filterContext);         
        filterContext.Controller.TempData["ModelState"] = 
           filterContext.Controller.ViewData.ModelState;
    }
}

public class RestoreModelStateFromTempDataAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
        if (filterContext.Controller.TempData.ContainsKey("ModelState"))
        {
            filterContext.Controller.ViewData.ModelState.Merge(
                (ModelStateDictionary)filterContext.Controller.TempData["ModelState"]);
        }
    }
}

Then as per your example, you could save / restore the ModelState like so:

[HttpGet]
[RestoreModelStateFromTempData]
public ActionResult Create(string uniqueUri)
{
    // get some stuff based on uniqueuri, set in ViewData.  
    return View();
}

[HttpPost]
[SetTempDataModelState]
public ActionResult Create(Review review)
{
    // validate review
    if (validatedOk)
    {
        return RedirectToAction("Details", new { postId = review.PostId});
    }  
    else
    {
        ModelState.AddModelError("ReviewErrors", "some error occured");
        return RedirectToAction("Create", new { uniqueUri = Request.RequestContext.RouteData.Values["uniqueUri"]});
    }   
}

If you also want to pass the model along in TempData (as bigb suggested) then you can still do that too.