Adding an Action to a Controller

The next change that we need to make to our controller is to add a method to it. 0:00 Well, not just any method, an action method. 0:04 What is an action method? 0:08 Every public method on a controller is an action method. 0:10 They're responsible for 0:13 performing any actions that are required to prepare a response for a request. 0:14 Let's add a public method to our controller using the name Detail. 0:20 If we want to return content for 0:27 our response, we need our action method to have a return type other than void. 0:28 For now let's use the string data type for our return type and 0:33 return the string literal, Hello from the comic books controller. 0:38 Okay, now that we have our controller set up, let's try again to run our website. 0:45 Visual Studio will build the project, open up your selected browser, which for 0:52 me is Google Chrome, and browse to the root of the website. 0:56 Bummer, we still get the same 404 error. 1:00 In order to understand why we're still getting this error, 1:04 we need to talk about how MVC associates URLs with controller actions. 1:07 But, for now, 1:12 I'm just going to show how to resolve this issue without giving you an explanation. 1:13 Don't worry, we'll cover all of the details in the next video. 1:18 Let's click into the address bar and 1:22 type the URL /comicbooks/detail and press Enter. 1:24 And now, we can see our content. 1:32 Before we end this video, let's try an experiment to see if the public 1:34 access modifier is required on either the controller class or the action method. 1:38 Let's close the browser and stop the website. 1:43 First, let's remove the public access modifier on the class, 1:47 save the file, and rerun our website. 1:52 Remember we need to browse to the URL /comic books/detail. 1:57 That's interesting. 2:03 Now we get a 404 error instead of the expected content. 2:04 Let's switch back to Visual Studio, stop the website, and 2:08 add the public access modifier back to the class. 2:13 When we rerun the website, Visual Studio will open another tab in Chrome. 2:17 Go ahead and close that tab and refresh the previously open tab. 2:22 Great, now our content is back. 2:27 So what does this tell us? 2:30 Controller classes need to be public. 2:32 Otherwise NVC won't be able to find and use them. 2:35 We could run the same experiment with our action method. 2:39 But I'll save us some time. 2:42 Action methods need to be public too, not surprisingly for 2:44 the same reason why we had to make the controller class public. 2:48 If our action methods aren't public, NVC won't be able to find and call them. 2:51 If you're using GitHub, let's commit our changes. 2:56 Enter a commit message of Added Detail 2:59 action method and click the Commit All button. 3:03 In the next video let's pull back the covers and 3:09 take a look at how NVC associates URLs with controller actions. 3:11