ASP.NET MVC passing Data from Controller Action to a second controller for output

Question

So basically I have a form with browser filters for data I'm displaying. I was hoping I could simply perform a post to my "SearchPost" controller, which handles all of the incoming filters and then spits out a Jquery grid for output, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a free Jquery grid view that works.

That said, I'm still using an Ajax Post to perform the data query, but in turn I'd like to render a partial view that would have that data passed back from the "SearchPost" controller action to my "DataOutput" controller action.

Example:

This is my Ajax Call:

 $.ajax(
     {
     type: "POST",
     url: "/TFS/SearchPost",
     data: $("#myform").serialize(),

     success: function () {
         $("#showresults").load("/TFS/DataOutput");
         },

      error: function (req, status, error) {
         alert("Sorry! We could not receive your feedback at this time.");
         }
      });

In turn, that calls this controller action that would query my data and generate my output list / grid somehow:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult SearchPost(TFS_mysearch tfs)
{

    List<Msg> TFSData = (from z in _DB.Msg.Take(10) select z).ToList();

    return ????       
}

And then the "Success" portion of my Ajax post would call the second controller action which would render my partial view containing the results. That make sense??

public ActionResult DataOutput(List<String> mylist) {

    return PartialView("DataOutput", mylist);

}

If anyone has an easy method to render my list data output to Json so that I could do it directly within my ajax, I could do that too, but figured that making use of a partial view might be cleaner.

Answer 1

i would suggest client side templates:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2009/05/03/using-jquery-with-client-side-data-binding-templates.aspx

Answer 2

So basically you don't want SearchPost returning a view, but data?

Maybe you want:

public ActionResult SearchPost(TFS_mysearch tfs)
{

    List<Msg> TFSData = (from z in _DB.Msg.Take(10) select z).ToList();

    return DataOutput(TFSData);      
}
public ActionResult DataOutput(List<String> mylist) {

    return PartialView("DataOutput", mylist);

}

except that the TFSData is a list of Msg's and DataOutput wants a list of strings. If you can reconsile that, then the above will work.

Answer 3

How about:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public JsonResult SearchPost(TFS_mysearch tfs)
{

    List<Msg> TFSData = (from z in _DB.Msg.Take(10) select z).ToList();

    return this.Json(TFSData);       
}

Have a look at this blog post for a fuller example.