I am building a search form for my web application using MVC3. My form is basically divided in two sections.
1st Section has 3 search criteria. First Name, Last Name and Zip code and beneath that section there is a "Search" button which I can click and it should do a client side validation and give me an error message if any of the fields are blank.
2nd section on the same page has just one textbox - to search by "Quote Number". So that section has one textbox to enter quote number and beneath there is another button called "Search". When I click on this search button it should only validate that the Quote Number field is not empty.
I have a viewmodel which has all 4 properties (FName,LName,Zip,Quote Number) and I am binding that on the page. Both the button will post back the page (I know that there is a way to identify which button was clicked on postback). The problem I am facing is on postback everything is posting back and if I use datannotations to do RequiredField check, it does validation on all the 4 fields but I should check for which button is clicked and based on that only fire validation on either 3 fields or only on 1 fields. How do I achieve this functionality? I hope I clearly explained the issue.
Thanks
Since this is MVC, don't think of these as postbacks, think of them as submits. As they are searching by different criteria, they should really be two different forms submitting to two different actions. As they are separate actions, each can have it's own view with it's own ViewModel and validation. Then to combine them into one physical page to present to the user just use partial rendering to put them both into the same view.
Basically the view you present to the user would have something like:
#{
Html.RenderAction("SearchByName");
}
<!-- maybe some markup to visually separate them -->
#{
Html.RenderAction("SearchByQuote");
}
Also gives you the added benefit of having each action be responsible for a single task and you don't have to put in code to figure out which button was clicked, etc.
And just in case you think to yourself "Hey, since both are search, just with different number of parameters, can't I overload the Search action?" No.
Kevin,
Change your page so that you have two different forms, one for each search type. When you click submit in one form, only that form's child fields will be validated.
Then, as R0MANARMY suggested, have two separate actions, one for each search form.
counsellorben
Related
Say I have a model that maps a person and I want to build a view for this model having some text inputs and a series of drop-downs to select state, province, city.
I'm adding #onchange = "this.form.submit()" in each #Html.DropDownListFor to post back to the server and drill-down the selection on those drop-downs.
How can I understand in my controller the source of said post? How do I distinguish the post coming from a drop-down change to the one coming from a submit button?
While not being able to understand the exact source of the postback, based on this question and answers I'm at least able to check if the source was one of the submit buttons by simply checking:
if(Request.Form["submitButtonNameAttribute"] != null)
When multiple buttons are available, only the clicked one is != null at postback.
Still, this is not a complete solution related to the original answer, but while a button may indicate an action to be run, other changes in the view may just invoke some sync work on the model.
I have a Product edit screen. The user can select a Vendor for the Product. To do this, I display a jQueryUI dialog box which allows them to browse for and select a Vendor. When the user selects the Vendor, I update a hidden VendorID input on the page, which is part of my page's model. I also update several divs with details about the Vendor they have selected. These are for display purposes only--only the id is needed to persist the selected Vendor.
This all works fine and dandy except when there is an error on postback, in which case I redisplay the same view. ModelState takes care of preserving all my form fields (including the hidden VendorID). However, my divs with the Vendor text are (of course) empty since they're not posted to the server.
I first went down the path of creating hidden fields for each of my Vendor display fields and putting them on the model. Then the hidden fields survive the postback, but that doesn't solve the problem of actually redisplaying the text on the screen.
The three options I can think of are:
On postback, if there is an error, go to the database, fetch the Vendor using the supplied VendorID and re-populate the model with the text I want to display.
Use RenderAction and have an action which renders the details of the selected Vendor.
Use readonly textboxes instead of divs to display the Vendor details.
None of these feel very satisfactory to me. I feel like I might be missing an obvious solution. Are there any better solutions?
I would suggest you not have the extra Vendor information come down as part of the main page. Create a javascript function showVendorInfo(). When called, if the VendorID hidden input has a value, it gets the relevant Vendor information via AJAX and displays it, using an AjaxGetVendorInfo action method. Call this function from two places:
In document.ready()
after a Vendor is selected with jQueryUI display.
Now, this would be in an action method. You could, if you expect your users to have latency issues, do the following to avoid some ajax calls: In the view check if you know the VendorID; if so, call Html.RenderAction call the same AjaxGetVendorInfo action method from the view.
A bonus to this is that it avoids what I have found to be a big no-no: Including both display-only values and model-binding values in your ViewModel. This makes for a very confusing ViewModel, especially when there are validation errors. [Getting on soap box] It's best to have your ViewModel to just have properties intended for modelbinding, for your state. Put list values, extra display information, etc., into ViewData or have them show up via AJAX.
You may thick that it is a silly question but I am confused!
I have a situation that I have a Lecture table.
And I want to store attendance of who have registered for it.
I have master table of People who will register, lecture table, and Important one table is attendance that stores P.k. as f.k. of rest of the table.
On Index view of lecture operator will select Attendance and enter attendance information.
My problem It show only one page for attendance entry and that page can also open open in EDIT mode, for editing attendance.
So what would be the design of the page and process flow of taking attendance?
Some of the ways:
You can use same page for editing and listing if you define block where are you rendering partial/dynamic block(user control). You need to extend HtmlHelper so you can pass name of a UserControl and you have to from controller pass to view(with ViewData) name of user control you want rendered. This way you can use same template(View/Page) with different actions and different response.
You can have editing on client. You can use jQuery UI library to popup dialog box for editing. For posting editing information back, you can use jquery .ajax method. As things happening on client and you request different actions on controller, it doesn't matter how you will approach this in design sense. You can use dialogs, you can transform existing elements on page etc.
Hope this helps
I have two forms on one page: a results form and a search form. The search form uses a partial view because it is displayed on several different pages. I want to be able to persist the data in the search form regardles of which button on which form the user clicks. The problem is that when the user clicks on a link or button from the results form, only the form values from the results form are posted, the values from the search form are not included. How can I maintain the values in the search form even when it is not the form that is submitted? I do not want to use any type of session state to maintain the form and I dont want to write the search values in hidden fields in the results form. I just want to be able to post them with the form values of the results form so that the users search criteria can be maintained accross any page that displays the search partial view. What am I missing?
The first thought that occured to me is to remove the form wrapping the search control and just let it be rendered into the form with the results data. I worry here about naming conflicts. What happens when the search from has a control with the same name as the results form, wouldn't this cause a naming conflict? I suppose that this could just be managed manually to ensure that there are unique names whenever rendering partial views into other views, perhaps even going so far as to prefix values with the partial view name, but that reminds me of the ugliness that is INamingContainer in web forms - plus makes for cumbersome field names in your model.
Is there some sort of elegant solution that will allow a form to persist state that I am missing? Thanks!
Normally, I persist the search criteria on the server side when the search is performed. If the user changes the search criteria after performing the search, then posts the form any changes are, of course, lost but that's arguably correct behavior since the search wasn't invoked. This is true whether the search is performed from a full post or via ajax. Handling it this way keeps the actions cleaner, I think as you don't need to handle the search data in the other actions.
If you absolutely need to have the search parameters included, you could consider having the second form post via javascript, pick up the search field values dynamically and add them to the second form (as hidden fields) prior to posting the second form. You wouldn't have to maintain the values in two places in synchronization, but you would have to copy them to the second form before posting.
At the moment i got it like this:
Forms which has search box, posts query (and additional data if needed) to search controller which then renders search view. Search view is made from search box and search results partial views. During this - search box form is reconstructed by posted data.
If i need search results form to perform another search request (for example, with specified page index), it goes through ajax, which posts search box form + page index from search results form. Take a look here for ideas (update that JS method with targetId parameter for updating specified div/form and post additional data if needed here like this:
form.serialize()+"&pageIndex=5"
In short: if you need to maintain state of form + update another in one page - consider using partial updates, otherwise you will end up inventing ViewState 2.0.
One caveat with this way - it's tricky to make search box contain something what is related with search results (i.e. - total count of found items). Before i managed to handle this, our designer did that - i just need to add div with appropriate class name ("sbsubst" or something) and it looks that it's inside search box. :)
When you have few forms at your page each form sends only its own data. In WebForms you had only one form (at least server-side) and each control was included into this form. In ASP.NET MVC you can use the same scenario and I'm afraid you will have to if you want to have the described behavior. Don't forget - partial forms don't have to be real forms. Moreover, RenderPartial is mostly used for "control-like" layout creation.
As for the second part of your question I would suggest naming your text boxes in search form with some normal prefix like "search" or something like that. For instance, if you have text box "text" and "language" in the form, you will have "searchText" and "searchLanguage". These names are quite unique and you will have normal names in your parameters.
I am not suggesting you populating the hidden values in your results form on POST event since you said it's not an option for you but still it may be the only way if you want to have two forms.
I think the best approach will be storing the text from search input when it changes in the query part of your second form action url. For example (not tested):
$('input#yourSearchInput').change(function()
{
var searchText = $(this).val();
// or? var searchText = encodeURIComponent($(this).val());
var secondForm = $('form#secondFormId');
var action = secondForm.attr('action');
var queryStart = action.lastIndexOf('?search=');
if(queryStart > -1) {
action = action.substring(1, queryStart);
}
action = action + "?search=" + searchText;
secondForm.attr('action', action);
});
In Controller (or custom filter):
protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
var search = Request.QueryString["search"];
if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(search)) {
ViewData["SearchFromPOST"] = search;
}
base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}
In your Search Control:
<%= TextBox("yourSearchInputId", ViewData["SearchFromPOST"]) %>
I have an application where I need the user to be able to update or delete rows of data from the database. The rows are displayed to the user using a foreach loop in the .aspx file of my view. Each row will have two text fields (txtName, txtDesc), an update button, and a delete button. What I'm not sure of, is how do I have the update button send the message to the controller for which row to update? I can see a couple way of doing this:
Put each row within it's own form tag, then when the update button is clicked, it will submit the values for that row only (there will also be a hidden field with the rowId) and the controller class would take all the post values as parameters to the Update method on the controller.
Somehow, have the button be scripted in a way to send back only the values for that row with a POST to the controller.
Is there a way of doing this? One thing I am concerned about is if each row has different names for it's controls assigned by ASP.NET (txtName1, txtDesc1, txtName2, txtDesc2), then how will their values get mapped to the correct parameters of the Controller method?
You can use multiple forms, and set the action on the form to be like this:
<form method="post" action="/YourController/YourAction/<%=rowId%>">
So you will have YourController/YourAction/1, YourController/YourAction/2 and so on.
There is no need to give different names to the different textboxes, just call them txtName, txtDesc etc (or even better, get rid of those txt prefixes). Since they are in different forms, they won't mix up.
Then on the action you do something like
public ActionResult YourAction(int id, string username, string description)
Where username, description are the same names that you used on the form controls (so they are mapped automatically). The id parameter will be automatically mapped to the number you put on the form action.
You can also have multiple "valid-named" buttons on the form like:
<input type="submit" value="Save" name="btnSave" id="btnSave"/>
<input type="submit" value="Delete" name="btnDelete" id="btnDelete" /
and than check to see what submit you have received. There can be only one submit action sent per form, so it is like all the other submit buttons did not actually existed in the first place:
if ( HttpContext.Request.Form["btnDelete"] != null ) {
//Delete stuff
} elseif ( HttpContext.Request.Form["btnSave"] != null ) {
//Update stuff
}
I also think that you can implement a custom ActionMethodSelectorAttribute like here http://weblogs.asp.net/dfindley/archive/2009/05/31/asp-net-mvc-multiple-buttons-in-the-same-form.aspx (also listed above) to have cleaner separated code.
As rodbv said you want to use seperate <form> elements.
When you are using Asp.Net MVC or classic html (php, classic asp, etc) you have to forget the Asp.Net way of handling button presses. When a form is posted back to the webserver all the server knows about is simply "the form was sent, and contained the following input elements".
Asp.net (standard) adds a wrapper round many of the standard html postback actions using javascript (the __doPostback javascript function is used almost everywhere) and this adds information about which input element of the form caused the postback and delivers it to the server in a hidden form variable. You could mimic this behavior if you really so desired, but I would recomend against it.
It may seem strange 'littering' a page with many <form>'s, however it will mean that the postback to the server will be lighter weight and should make everything run that little bit faster for the user.