Articles → ASP .NET MVC → How MVC Maintains Values Without Viewstate

How MVC Maintains Values Without Viewstate

In this article, we will see how MVC application post values to the server and how the MVC methodology is different from traditional viewstate approach?

To answer this question let me create couple of projects

One is a sample MVC application that contains a textbox and a button
Other is another sample web form application that also contains the same set of controls i.e. textbox and button.

Let me run both the applications and compare the UI of both the applications.

Picture showing the sample web page of webform and MVC application

Click to Enlarge

UI part is almost same in both the applications. Now follow these steps for both the applications

Run the application by pressing F5 (run one application at one time)
Open developer tool (press F12)
Go to Network tab
Click on ‘Start Capturing’ (see the following figure)

Picture showing the Start Capturing button to capture the traffic on the web page

Click to Enlarge

Enter some value in textbox
Click on the button.
Click on ‘Stop Capturing’
Click on ‘Got to detailed view’ button

Now let us examine the request body and response body tab of the developer tool.

Web form application →

Picture showing the response body of the webform application

Click to Enlarge

If you see the request body and response body tab in the preceding figure, you observe that web form sends other information (apart from control value) like control state etc. in the form of viewstate and in response gets the rendered HTML.

MVC application →

Picture showing the response body of the MVC application

Click to Enlarge

In case of MVC application only control values are posted to the server and in response get the rendered HTML.

So the difference in both the approaches is – MVC application post only required data to the server during the round trip. But traditional web applications post other information about the controls as well.

But How The Values Remain Intact In MVC?

MVC does not have page cycle and does not support post back. So values in MVC remains intact.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Friday, July 31, 2015

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