ASP.NET MVC Page Editing Contrast To Web Forms

Question

In our old system we had pages rendered from XSLT. In order to change the page into "edit" mode we would have a button of some sort, once clicked would have an EditYN flag which would be passed to the stored procedure. The stored procedure would simply give this variable back to indicate that the page was in edit mode. This meant that query strings, viewstate or session data were not required to indicate that the page is in edit mode.

I've been dealing with ASP.NET MVC only for the last week for RND purposes at work. I'm wondering what's the best way to have a page which displays data, to then turn into a page where you can edit all of that data? Should you move to a separate page? Should you stay on the same page and have rendering logic in the view to show the edit mode of the page?

Whilst on the same topic, I thought I'd also ask about GridViews and their place in the MVC architecture. Beforehand we'd simply use data sources and set them up with the GridView. Then the GridView could enter edit mode quite easily by itself with the UPDATE query set in the data source. How should this process be done using MVC?

Answer 1

Make a submit button for your edit mode. The controller action will respond to POST, set the "InEdit" flag in your model, then return the same view again. The view can then render based on the flag. But I would rather create two different views, for view and edit modes, then based on the flag analysis done in the controller action just return the one or the other view.

Answer 2

Whilst on the same topic, I thought I'd also ask about GridViews and their place in the MVC architecture. How should this process be done using MVC?

You can use javascript, something like jqGrid or Yahoo´s datatable. For simpler datatables, you can use jQuery´s tablesorter.

On the backend, your controller returns json objects that can be modified by the client, ie. the javascript grid which then sends the data back to the controller to be saved.