ASP.NET MVC Render Ajax / Standard View

Question

I am a little confused and making it alot more complicated than this needs to be! Here is what I have...

A view which displays a drop down of US States. When the user chooses a state it loads a list of data from a database and returns the results (populates the View Model) and the View renders the information.

What I wanted to do was have have the dropdown trigger an Ajax event which performs the data load, but also wanted it to depreciate if the user didn't have Javascript enabled. How would I go about rendering the view with AND without javascript / ajax?

Hope that makes sense. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You can't re-populate a drop-down without jscript. You can do a page-reload with a new drop-down though, although the logic to determine which to use is javascript unfortunately. (Not to mention triggering the re-load of the page on click)

No Javascript support though? That seems kind of out of date, most people run javascript-enabled browsers these days. As for paranoia freaks with javascript turned off, a <noscript> block to tell them to get over it may be appropriate.

Answer 2

To do this with ajax, read this article about cascade dropdowns by Stephen Walther.

To do this without ajax, you could put your first dropdown in a form with a button visible only when javascript is disabled (hide this with javascript for that) wich gets to some action (in another window, maybe) wich returns the second dropdown populated according to the element selected on the first (on the first window, if you have 2 - you could know this url using a viewstate variable).