In an MVC view, what controller and method is called if none is specified in the form tag?

Question

I have a MVC project I inherited. On the views, there's no route (controller and action) specified in the BeginForm tag. The view renders correctly so I assume it is picking a default route.

My question is how does it know what route to use if one isn't specified? What's the best practice here: should you specify a route or let it default?

So the view is Views/Config/WorkCodes.cshtml and the tag is

Html.BeginForm()

It goes to the controller ConfigController.cs and calls action WorkCodes(). If I was doing the project, I would have wrote

Html.BeginForm("WorkCodes", "Config", FormMethod.Post)

How does MVC know which controller and action to use without specifying it?

WorkCodes.cshtml

@{
  ViewBag.Title = "Work Codes";
}

@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
<div>
    <table style="width: 100%;" class="trHoverHighlight">
        <tbody>
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <br />
                    <div>
                        <button id="buttonCreateNew" type="button">Add New</button>&nbsp;
                        <button id="buttonReturn" type="button">Return</button>
                    </div>

                </td>
            </tr>
        </tbody>
    </table>
</div>

}

ConfigController.cs

    public ActionResult WorkCodes()
    {
        return View(Rep.GetWorkAll(true));
    }

Here's where the view is called from in another view:

                @foreach (var itm in (List<string>)ViewBag.ListObjects)
                {
                        <li>
                            <a href="../Config/@itm">Work Codes</a>
                        </li>  
                }

Answer 1

The View is generated from performing HTTP GET to the WorkCodes controller action, thus by default the form generated in that view performs an HTTP POST to a controller action with the same name.

Here's the MSDN docs.

BeginForm(HtmlHelper) Writes an opening tag to the response. The form uses the POST method, and the request is processed by the action method for the view.