Calling a MVC2 partial view using jquery returns empty string problem

Question

I have an issue where I have a partial view that returns some HTML to be displayed. Its called when something is clicked on the page using jquery. The problem is that no matter how I call it, i get back an empty string even though it reports success. This is happening to me using Chrome, going against my local machine.

My controller looks like this:

public ActionResult MyPartialView()
{
    return PartialView(model);
}

I have tried jquery using .get(), .post() and .load() and all have the same results. Here is an example using .post():

$.post(url, function (data)
{
    alert(data);
});

The result always comes back as an empty string. I can navigate to the partial view in the browser manually and i get back the desired HTML. The URL I am using to call it I resolved fully so it looks like "http://localhost/controller/mypartialview" rather than using the relative path of "/controller/mypartialview" which I thought was the original problem. Any idea what may cause this?

Answer 1

It's hard to tell what the problem is. If you have a correct view of your html when accessing the same URL via the browser, that means your server side is good to go (w/ HTTP GET).

• So then I would say that the problem is in the jQuery usage. Try hard coding the url into the jQuery code, so that you make sure jQuery is getting the right url.

  $.get( 'http://localhost/controller/mypartialview', function(data){ alert(data); } );

• Did you set the $.ajax global options? (Not that you need to, just maybe you set something up previously, and that's messing up your new request)

• Make sure you aren't sending any query when accesed thru Browser. Which might make it work via Browser and not through jQuery.

I definitely recommend you to install Firefox and Firebug, to do a better debug of your AJAX requests.

Answer 2

I figured it out. At first I thought I had to resolve the URL completely starting with the http:// but I accidentally forgot to include the port that the visual studio webserver was using. It just used http://localhost/ instead of http://localhost:2858/ as the base. Once I changed it back to use the relative path instead, it started working. I am guessing jquery resolves relative paths for you based on the current page's url in the ajax methods.