title: Basic MVC (button to send e-mail) - ActionLink?
body: <p>I have a 'mail server configuration' kind of view. On this view are 2 buttons:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[SOME FORM FIELDS]
  &lt;input class="button" type="submit" value="@T("Save")" /&gt;
  &lt;input class="button" type="submit" value="@T("Send Test Email")" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The first button calls off to my controller and returns the same view with any validation/success messages (this is a form):</p>
  
  <pre><code>[HttpPost]
  public ActionResult Index(MailServerSettingsViewModel viewModel)
  {
      ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That works brilliantly, but obviously the 'Send Test Email' button will do the same.</p>
  
  <p>Assuming I don't want to come away from the page (i.e. load a different view), but want to call off to another controller to send a test e-mail, is the 'proper' way to do this to use the <code>ActionLink</code> helper? From this other controller can I then return this same form view? Or can I somehow use the same controller but determine which button was pressed to decide whether to validate the view model or just call off to another service/class/whatever to send the test e-mail and responding appropriately?</p>
  
  <p>You can probably tell from the way I'm asking this that I come from a WebForms background and it's still a case of me getting used to what's what with MVC.</p>
  
  <p><strong>What I've Tried</strong></p>
  
  <p>For now, I'm actually calling off to this other controller asynchronously with AJAX. It actually works well, and is probably most appropriate, but this won't always be the case so I want to know how I'd achieve the above for other scenarios.</p>