Asp.net MVC Show specific items in Gridview/table depending on textbox

Question

Is it possible to grab specific elements from a database via the entity framework and display them after clicking a 'Find' button on the page?

Lets say there is a textbox and you have to enter a number. Upon entering a certain number, a certain database table's column will be searched for that number and all instances will be returned (every matching row) but instead of displaying every column in the table, only 3 or 4 columns would be shown. Is that possible? Ive tried a few things with no success.

Also, with my old site, I had a gridview and used a mouseover/click javascript event that would change the color of the whole row upon a mouseover/out and click. Can that be done with a table and/or a gridview in MVC? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

that's the great thing about MVC, you can really do anything. For your first question, sounds like a simple Ajax.BeginForm around your textbox.

<div id="mygrid"></div>

<% using (Ajax.BeginForm("/path/to/action/", null, 
          new AjaxOptions { InsertionMode = InsertionMode.Replace, 
          UpdateTargetId = "mygrid" }))  {%>
<%= Html.TextBox("q") %>
<input type="submit" value="search" />
<% } %>

Note the UpdateTargetId that points to the empty div, and the insertionmode that would replace the contents of mygrid with whatever is returned from "/path/to/action/". The action method could simply render a partial view that contains the table columns you want to display :-)

As to your second question, that can be accomplished with a little CSS and maybe jQuery magic :-)

$("#mygrid tr").click(function() {
  $(this).toggleClass("highlighted");
});