Multiple text boxes used for filtering/searching in MVC C#

Question

Hello,

I am trying to create a form in MVC C# that will allow a user to input a Last Name, First Name, Department, Year and click a Search button that will bring back a list of employees based off the inputted search criteria.

My problem is allowing multiple search textbox criteria into one search button.

I am able to hardcode values into an html actionlink like below and it works but unable to grab the values from the textboxes.

<%= Html.ActionLink("Results", "Results", new { lastName = "Smith", 
    firstName = "", dept = "", year = "2008" } )%>

I would really just like to have four textboxes and a search button to bring the list back from the database.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I think you need to use a form and a submit button, then you'll get the values of all the input fields in the form, you could do this with ajax so it wont refresh the whole page.

If you dont want the form solution, you could use some javascript (jquery is good) to detect the value change of the textboxes and then grab the value of the textboxes and do an ajax call to the controller, sending this values.

Answer 2

If you have it in a form, you can catch a submit of that together with values for each textbox (or any other tag in the form).

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Results(string lastName, string firstName, string dept, int year)

That method overloads Results and is launched only by a POST request.

Answer 3

On your Index.aspx page

<% using (Html.BeginForm()) { %>

   <%= Html.TextBox("firstname") %>
   <%= Html.TextBox("lastname") %>

   <input id="submit1" type="submit" value="Submit" />

<% } %>

This will post the "firstname" and "lastname" form field values and you pick them up in your action like in @Trimack's example.

You can carry the posted data forward to your results page with TempData.

TempData["firstName"] = firstname;

In your results.aspx page you'd have:

<%= Html.Hidden("firstname", TempData["firstName"]) %>