ASP .NET MVC partial views and routing

Question

Hi, I have an MVC view that contains a number of partial views. These partial views are populated using partial requests so the controller for the view itself doesn't pass any data to them. Is it possible to reload the data in one of those partial views if an action was triggered in another? For example, one partial view has a jqGrid and I want to refresh the data in another partial view when a user selects a new row in this grid. Is there a code example for this scenario (in C#) that I can look at to see what am I doing wrong? I am using ajax calls to trigger a new request but non of the partial views are refreshed so I am not sure if the issue is with the routing, the controller, or if this even possible at all! Thanks!

Answer 1

If your partial view action returns a ViewResult, the response contains an HTML chunk. However, an Ajax call does not automatically insert the result into the DOM, as the result can be in any number of formats and/or might need additional processing before the DOM is updated. So, in order to get your partial view refreshed, you need to take the result of the Ajax call and insert it in the right place in the DOM tree.

jQuery has a nifty load() method, that will encapsulate this process for you. It'll make the Ajax call, take the result and replace the inner HTML of the selected element. You can even pass it your own function to be executed before it inserts it in the DOM tree, if you need to transform the result in any way.

Side note: jQuery.load() strips scripts returned in the result. It does retain them for execution in certain sceanrios, but it does not even execute them in other scenarios. So, if your partial view contains scripts, you might consider updating the DOM tree yourself.

All that this has nothing to do with your C# code, which runs on the server side.

However, you do have the ability to make your action a little bit smarter by checking if the request is plain HTML, so the result will be rendered by the browser directly, or if it's an Ajax call and the result will be processed by your script before getting in the DOM. This check is done using the Request extension method IsAjaxRequest.