Run MVC controller action without the view?

Question

I have an ExcelResult action result that returns Microsoft Excel documents, based off the Stephen Walther tip. Basically it just writes a stream out to the Response. When debugging VS 2010 (ASP.NET Dev Server), it runs fine, but when I run it on an IIS 6 box, I get the following error:

The view 'GenerateExcel' or its master was not found. The following locations were searched: ~/Views/Home/GenerateExcel.aspx ~/Views/Home/GenerateExcel.ascx ~/Views/Shared/GenerateExcel.aspx ~/Views/Shared/GenerateExcel.ascx

There is no associated View, and therefore no file, but there shouldn't have to be. What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE

By simply returning void instead of an ActionResult, I no longer have this issue. Instead of returning the ExcelResult, I'm explicitly calling it's ExecuteResult method, which is writing to the output stream.

Before

public ActionResult GenerateExcel()
{
    return this.Excel(parameters);
}

After

    public void GenerateExcel()
{
ExcelResult excelResult = this.Excel(parameters);
excelResult.ExecuteResult(null);
}

After that, I had security issues with my NTLM authentication, but they 'went away' (meaning I expect them to come back). For now, though, everything is working properly.

Answer 1

Make sure your action method does not return a ActionResult:

public void DoSomething()

Answer 2

This is quite useful in a scenario when we have hundreds or thousands of views. Will in that case we create hundreds or thousands of controller actions? Of course not, then how can we fix it?

In the MVC Framework, the controller class includes a method, HandleUnknownAction(), that executes whenever we attempt to invoke an action (or when we request a view that has no matching action method) on a controller that does not exist.

I believe,this answers your question.