asp.net mvc - Difference between redirectToAction() and View()

Question

As I am new to ASP.NET MVC can anybody tell me the difference between return RedirectToAction() and return View()?

Answer 1

return View() tells MVC to generate HTML to be displayed and sends it to the browser.

RedirectToAction() tells ASP.NET MVC to respond with a Browser redirect to a different action instead of rendering HTML. The browser will receive the redirect notification and make another request for the new action.

An example ...

let's say you are building a form to collect and save data, your URL looks like SomeEntity/Edit/23. In the Edit action you will do return View() to render a form with input fields to collect the data.

For this example let's say that on successful save of the data you want to display the data that has been saved. After processing the user's submitted data, if you do something like a RedirectToAction("Index") where Index is the action that will display the data. The browser will get a HTTP 302 (temporary redirect) to go to /SomeEntity/Index/23.