How to pass data from a jquery dialog back to a controller's action to update the dialog

Question

Hi,

I am using asp.net MVC, and we're using the jquery dialog (http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/) so that while a user is creating a new order, they can look up books via this overlay, and the overlay will return the ID of the book to an action which will add it to the order.

We're able to display a list of books in the overlay, but how would we allow them to search or filter this list?

What is the best way to have the overlay partial view send information to a controller, then have that controller update the list of books in the overlay?

thank you

Answer 1

The common way to do this would be to have the dialog return a value for the selected book. A close handler in the hosting page would then redirect the browser to that book's route:

http://yoursite.com/books/55

I glanced at the documentation for that dialog plugin but I didn't see anything to suggest that dialog has this capability. You may need to look for a dialog that can return values in the close handler.