How do I redirect to the previous action in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

Lets suppose that I have some pages

• some.web/articles/details/5
• some.web/users/info/bob
• some.web/foo/bar/7

that can call a common utility controller like

locale/change/es or authorization/login

How do I get these methods (change, login) to redirect to the previous actions (details, info, bar) while passing the previous parameters to them (5, bob, 7)?

In short: How do I redirect to the page that I just visited after performing an action in another controller?

Answer 1

try:

public ActionResult MyNextAction()
{
    return Redirect(Request.UrlReferrer.ToString());
}

alternatively, touching on what darin said, try this:

public ActionResult MyFirstAction()
{
    return RedirectToAction("MyNextAction",
        new { r = Request.Url.ToString() });
}

then:

public ActionResult MyNextAction()
{
    return Redirect(Request.QueryString["r"]);
}

Answer 2

If you want to redirect from a button in the View you could use:

@Html.ActionLink("Back to previous page", null, null, null, new { href = Request.UrlReferrer})

Answer 3

If you are not concerned with unit testing then you can simply write:

return Redirect(ControllerContext.HttpContext.Request.UrlReferrer.ToString());