Hi all,
I want to build a webapplication with a "Single Page Interface", using ASP.NET MVC.
I have searched if this was at least possible and I think the answer is: not by simple means (reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc507641.aspx#S2 second-last paragraph; that article is from May 2008, though).
I found other examples which implemented this by coding/hacking with jQuery. However, I'm looking for a clean solution, using standard .NET approaches, if possible.
What I want is precisely the same functionality when you create a new "MVC Web Application". However, instead of links to "/Home/About" which reloads the entire page, I want links to "#Home/About" which loads only the new part via AJAX.
The standard approach of calling templates (partial views) with Html.RenderPartial is exactly what I want, only then loading them in through AJAX-requests.
Of course, it might be that I can't use these templates that are rendered by the Master-page for some reason (maybe it's expecting to always be called in a certain context from a certain place or so). But maybe there's another clean solution for how to build your template-pages and fetching them from the Master-page.
Who has a nice solution for implementing such thing, a Single Page Interface?
PS: I'm developing in Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with MVC 1.0 installed, in C#
[edit] Below I read that working with the templates is possible and that jQuery looks indeed like inevitable, so I tested it. The following code transforms regular links created by Html.ActionLink into anchor-links (with #) to contain history, and then fetch the page via AJAX and only injecting the html-part I'm interested in (i.e. the partial page inside div#partialView):
$("a").each(function() {
$(this).click(function() {
$("div#partialView").load($(this).attr("href") + " div#partialView");
location.hash = $(this).attr("href");
return false;
});
});
These links also allow for graceful degredation.
But what I have left now, is still fetching the whole page instead of only the partial page. Altering the controller didn't help; it still provided me html of the whole page, with all of these statements:
public ActionResult About()
{
return View();
return View("About");
return PartialView();
return PartialView("About");
}
How could I only return the content of the part I'm interested in (i.e. the contents of Home/About.aspx)? What I'd like is POSTing a value with AJAX (e.g. "requesttype=ajax") so that my controller knows the page is fetched via AJAX and only returns the partial page; otherwise it will return the whole page (i.e. when you visit /Home/About instead of #Home/About).
Is a good practice to alter Global.asax.cs maybe, to create a new routing schema for AJAX-calls, which will only return partial pages? (I haven't looked into this much, yet.)
[edit2]
Robert Koritnik was right: I also needed an About.ascx page (UserControl) with only the small HTML-content of that page. The first line of About.aspx was linked with the Master-page via MasterPageFile="~/..../Site.master"
which caused that all HTML was printed.
But to be able to execute the following in my controller:
public ActionResult About()
{
return Request.IsAjaxRequest() ? (ActionResult)PartialView() : View();
}
I needed to alter the way a PartialView
(.ascx file) and a View
(.aspx) file was found, otherwise both methods would return the same page (About.aspx
, ultimately resulting in an infinite loop).
After putting the following in Global.asax.cs
, the correct pages will be returned with PartialView()
and View()
:
protected void Application_Start()
{
foreach (WebFormViewEngine engine in ViewEngines.Engines.Where(c => c is WebFormViewEngine))
{
/* Normal search order:
new string[] { "~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx",
"~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx",
"~/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx"
"~/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx"
};
*/
// PartialViews match with .ascx files
engine.PartialViewLocationFormats = new string[] { "~/Views/{1}/{0}.ascx", "~/Views/Shared/{0}.ascx" };
// Views match with .aspx files
engine.ViewLocationFormats = new string[] { "~/Views/{1}/{0}.aspx", "~/Views/Shared/{0}.aspx" };
}
RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}