Q:

ASP.Net MVC How to pass data from view to controller

I am completely new to ASP.Net and I am sure this is a very basic question 
I have a View in which there is a link to generate report but to be able to generate report I must ask the user to provide a suitable text name as well.
So far I have been able to pass data from server to view using Models passed from my controller to view, but I am not sure how to Pass data from view to my controller.
I just need to pass a string from view to controller in this case.
Any advice with example will be appreciated.
UPDATE
I understand I have to post the data back to server but how does that realize in the form of razorhtml code and controller?

A:

You can do it with ViewModels like how you passed data from your controller to view.
Assume you have a viewmodel like this
public class ReportViewModel
{
   public string Name { set;get;}
}

and in your GET Action,
public ActionResult Report()
{
  return View(new ReportViewModel());
}

and your view must be strongly typed to ReportViewModel
@model ReportViewModel
@using(Html.BeginForm())
{
  Report NAme : @Html.TextBoxFor(s=>s.Name)
  <input type="submit" value="Generate report" />
}

and in your HttpPost action method in your controller
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Report(ReportViewModel model)
{
  //check for model.Name property value now
  //to do : Return something
}

OR Simply, you can do this without the POCO classes (Viewmodels)
@using(Html.BeginForm())
{
   <input type="text" name="reportName" />
   <input type="submit" />
}

and in your HttpPost action, use a parameter with same name as the textbox name.
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Report(string reportName)
{
  //check for reportName parameter value now
  //to do : Return something
}

EDIT : As per the comment
If you want to post to another controller, you may use this overload of the BeginForm method.
@using(Html.BeginForm("Report","SomeOtherControllerName"))
{
   <input type="text" name="reportName" />
   <input type="submit" />
}

Passing data from action method to view ?
You can use the same view model, simply set the property values in your GET action method
public ActionResult Report()
{
  var vm = new ReportViewModel();
  vm.Name="SuperManReport";
  return View(vm);
}

and in your view
@model ReportViewModel
<h2>@Model.Name</h2>
<p>Can have input field with value set in action method</p>
@using(Html.BeginForm())
{
  @Html.TextBoxFor(s=>s.Name)
  <input type="submit" />
}

A:

In case you don't want/need to post:
@Html.ActionLink("link caption", "actionName", new { Model.Page })  // view's controller
@Html.ActionLink("link caption", "actionName", "controllerName", new { reportID = 1 }, null);

[HttpGet]
public ActionResult actionName(int reportID)
{

Note that the reportID in the new {} part matches reportID in the action parameters, you can add any number of parameters this way, but any more than 2 or 3 (some will argue always) you should be passing a model via a POST (as per other answer)
Edit: Added null for correct overload as pointed out in comments.  There's a number of overloads and if you specify both action+controller, then you need both routeValues and htmlAttributes.  Without the controller (just caption+action), only routeValues are needed but may be best practice to always specify both.

A:

<form action="myController/myAction" method="POST">
 <input type="text" name="valueINeed" />
 <input type="submit" value="View Report" />
</form> 

controller:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult myAction(string valueINeed)
{
   //....
}

