What is the purpose of the Name parameter in HttpPostAttribute

Question

I am seeing the following code being applied in .net core action methods:

[HttpPost("MyAction", Name = "MyAction")]
public IActionResult MyAction()
{
    // some code here
}

What is the purpose of the "Name" parameter in the HttpPost attribute?

Answer 1

The Name property is used for Url Generation. It has nothing to do with routing! You can omit it almost all the time.

Add the following code to your controller and you will get the "Aha!":

[HttpGet("qqq", Name = "xxx")]
public string yyy()
{
   return "This is the action yyy";
}

[HttpGet("test")]
public string test()
{
    var url = Url.Link("xxx", null);  //Mine is https://localhost:44384/api/qqq
    return $"The url of Route Name xxx is {url}";
}

The Name property in the first action, when used, for example, to generate a url, is merely used to reference the action yyy. In my set up, invoking /api/test returns the string The url of Route Name xxx is https://localhost:44384/api/qqq.

Action yyy is reachable by the route .../qqq, the first parameter passed to the HttpGet attribute constructor.