ContentResult vs. string

I recently was asked why to use ContentResult instead of returning string. Unfortunately I could not give a better answer than: “It is best practice.”

Does anyone have a better answer?

To better understand the question. What’s the difference?

public ActionResult Foo(){
    return Content("Some string");
}

public string Bar(){
    return "Some string";
}

Answers:

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Method 1

If you return something other than an ActionResult the default behavior is to create a ContentResult wrapping the result of calling ToString() on whatever you did return (or EmptyResult if you returned null). Reasons I can think of to explicitly return ContentResult:

• It reinforces the fact that the method is an action, rather than a regular method, so devs are less likely to make mistakes like casually renaming it.
• If in the future you need to specify the content-type you won’t need to change the method signature.
• It doesn’t hide the ToString() call. This doesn’t matter if you’re returning string, but returning a complex type could have unexpected results.

Method 2

You can’t return a string on a method which returns an ActionResult, so this is when you could use a ContentResult to return a plain string like so:

public ContentResult Hello()
{
    return Content("hello world!");
}

ContentResult by default returns a type of text/plain. If you only ever needed to return a string, then you would use the method to return a string

Method 3

Two main advantages:

• You can specify the content encoding via the ContentEncoding property
• You can specify the content type (ie, ‘text/html’) via the ContentType property

Also, if you want to be OO-clean about it, ContentResult, along with all ActionResult derived classes follow the Command Pattern by providing an ExecuteResult command for the MVC pipeline to run.

UPDATE: 19-Nov-2020
The original Command Pattern link (dead link) was no longer working so I updated it to reference a similar Microsoft document. Also, to see a great explanation on the Command Pattern, view this link.

Method 4

Returning a ContentResult helps protect your application.

E.g If your application allows input from users, a malicious user might try to parse a javascript text. This will prevent javascript from executing in your application

Method 5

One difference as i know is :

Content return result without quotations marks if you want.

String return result in Quotations marks all the time.

Method 6

One another difference is Content result can return different content’s result. Like string, Html, JavaScript result etc.

But string return only the string result.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0