Getting Ajax return to replace whole page

Question

This is a followup question to the one I posted last week "Ajax.ActionLink not Posting". I did finally get it to Post, and it properly calls my Delete action and deletes the record. The Delete method returns a RedirectToAction("List") so that the new data set minus the deleted record is re-listed. Except that what actually happens is - NOTHING. The listing doesn't change. And I'm pretty sure I know why: calling Ajax.ActionLink returns an Ajax result which is only supposed to replace a designated element (the UpdateTargetId option parameter) in the document. And since I haven't designated any, it doesn't replace anything, even though it's a whole fresh page.

My question is, what do I pass to the AjaxOption.UpdateTargetId to get it to wipe the whole page and reload with the new result, just as though Html.ActionLink had been called (recalling that the only reason for using Ajax.ActionLink was that I wanted the method invoked with a POST instead of a GET)? (And since this page uses a Master Page, I don't have the option of just putting an ID on the body element.)

Answer 1

You can do a POST without Ajax. You would need to use a Form and change your ActionLink to a Submit button. That might be the simplest way.

Otherwise, you need to change your List action to return a PartialView. This is what renders to your UpdateTargetId, which you can just set as an outer div on your page.

Do you really need to reload your list at all? You can do your Ajax POST to delete the row in the database, and use the OnSuccess property of the AjaxOptions to call a JavaScript function which then removes the row from the html on the page.