ASP.NET MVC Request Processing

• In a traditional Web Forms and Web Pages application, every page request is translated into a call to a physical file in the web-server.

• In the case of an MVC application, when you make a request (e.g.,http://mywebsite/mychapters/list), a component called routing engine matches the request to a specific route. 

• A route defines requests using a pattern string and establishes the controller and method in the controller class that should process the request. 

• Once the route is identified, the routing engine creates a request handler that in turn will create the controller object that will process the request (in our example, the controller is “mychapters”).

• The controller then invokes the method in the controller class that will process the request (in the example is named “list”).

• These methods in controller classes that process requests are called action methods.

• When the processing of the request ends, the action method produces a result to send back to the user. 

• Normally the result is some HTML (rendered by a View) the user will see in the browser