ASP.NET MVC: Is it "wrong" to use HTTP 500 via an AJAX request to return invalid form content?

Question

Here's the situation:

I've got two partial views. One has a form.

What needs to happen is when the form is posted via an AJAX request, if the operation succeeds, the area with the second partial is repopulated with the content. However, if the posted data was invalid, the original partial is repopulated with an error message.

I'm using jQuery and the ajaxForm plugin to handle the form posts and responses. Would it be "wrong"/bad coding/wtf-worthy to conditionally use $.html() to replace the content in one area when it's a 200, and a different area if it's a 500?

To me, this idea smells, but I'm not sure how else to accomplish the goal.

Answer 1

Sounds like you should use 400 (Bad Request), not 500 (Internal Server Error), since the error is on the client side.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

Answer 2

Yeah, I wouldn't think that's a good idea. I don't think you should use either 400 or 500, but always 20x.

In this case, you could play with content-types, and have your error messages returned as JSON strings instead of HTML. I have used this kind of idea before, although using prototypejs instead of jQuery and it worked well.