Overload MVC Action Methods

This blog will go over how to overload the MVC action method. Let me demonstrate with a simple MVC application.

I have created an MVC application and added the controller to it. I’d like to use polymorphism in this controller. I added two action methods with the same name but different parameters to the same controller.

public ActionResult GetCustomers()  
   {  
      return Content("This method will return all the customers");  
   }  
public ActionResult GetCustomers(string customerid)  
   {  
      return Content("This method will return individual customer");  
   }

Build the application after adding the above methods to the controller.

During the compile time, we will not get any errors, because C# supports polymorphism. The question is will this code will work in run time? if I run this application I will get the below error.

MVC is unsure which method to invoke. So let us try to figure out what is going on internally.

Polymorphism is an object-oriented concept that C# respects. MVC action methods are called using the HTTP protocol. A URL cannot contain a duplicate address or name.

The following question is, how do we implement polymorphism or run both methods?

We have an attribute in MVC called “ActionName”. The ActionName attribute is a type of action selector that is used to specify a different name for the action method. When we want that action method to be called with a different name rather than the method’s actual name, we use the ActionName attribute. and we can use this method to implement or run these methods.

[ActionName("Getall")]  
 public ActionResult GetCustomers()  
 {  
    return Content("This method will return all customers");  
 }  
 [ActionName("Getbyid")]  
 public ActionResult GetCustomers(string customerid)  
 {  
     return Content("This method will return individual customer");  
 }

OUTPUT