Refactoring Switch statement in my Controller - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I'm currently working on a MVC.NET 3 application; I recently attended a course by "Uncle Bob" Martin which has inspired me (shamed me?) into taking a hard look at my current development practice, particularly my refactoring habits.
So: a number of my routes conform to:
{controller}/{action}/{type}
Where type typically determines the type of ActionResult to be returned, e.g:
public class ExportController
{
public ActionResult Generate(String type, String parameters)
{
switch (type)
{
case "csv":
//do something
case "html":
//do something else
case "json":
//do yet another thing
}
}
}
Has anyone successfully applied the "replace switch with polymorhism" refactoring to code like this? Is this even a good idea? Would be great to hear your experiences with this kind of refactoring.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The way I am looking at it, this controller action is screaming for a custom action result:
public class MyActionResult : ActionResult
{
public object Model { get; private set; }
public MyActionResult(object model)
{
if (model == null)
{
throw new ArgumentNullException("Haven't you heard of view models???");
}
Model = model;
}
public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
{
// TODO: You could also use the context.HttpContext.Request.ContentType
// instead of this type route parameter
var typeValue = context.Controller.ValueProvider.GetValue("type");
var type = typeValue != null ? typeValue.AttemptedValue : null;
if (type == null)
{
throw new ArgumentNullException("Please specify a type");
}
var response = context.HttpContext.Response;
if (string.Equals("json", type, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
var serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
response.ContentType = "text/json";
response.Write(serializer.Serialize(Model));
}
else if (string.Equals("xml", type, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(Model.GetType());
response.ContentType = "text/xml";
serializer.Serialize(response.Output, Model);
}
else if (string.Equals("csv", type, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
// TODO:
}
else
{
throw new NotImplementedException(
string.Format(
"Sorry but \"{0}\" is not a supported. Try again later",
type
)
);
}
}
}
and then:
public ActionResult Generate(string parameters)
{
MyViewModel model = _repository.GetMeTheModel(parameters);
return new MyActionResult(model);
}
A controller should not care about how to serialize the data. That's not his responsibility. A controller shouldn't be doing any plumbing like this. He should focus on fetching domain models, mapping them to view models and passing those view models to view results.

Answer 2

If you wanted to "replace switch with polymorphism" in this case, you could create three overloaded Generate() ActionResult methods. Using custom model binding, make the Type parameter a strongly-typed enum called DataFormat (or whatever.) Then you'd have:
public ActionResult Generate(DataFormat.CSV, String parameters)
{
}
public ActionResult Generate(DataFormat.HTML, String parameters)
{
}
public ActionResult Generate(DataFormat.JSON, String parameters)
{
}
Once you get to this point, you can refactor further to get the repetition out of your Controller.