ASP.Net MVC and Webservices/Ajax - Which route to take?

Question

Hello

I'm developing an ASP.Net mvc application which has a requirement to do some small, atomic actions without an entire page postback. The logical way of doing this is of course with an ajax call.

My question is - What would people suggest is the best way of achieving this?

As far as I am aware I can do it along the following lines:

• WCF + ajax
• Controller actions within the mvc application - Possibly returning as JSON result.
• Webservices (seperate/combined project) + ajax

I have a requirement that the user be logged on when using the webservice/wcf/ajax, which is currently done via cookie/session id but as far as I am aware all the above methods allow this.

On the whole whichever method I end up using will be accessing the database via standardised accessible method calls, so I'm not tied into keeping everything within the same project/namespace.

Would love to hear peoples thoughts / experiences on this!

Answer 1

I would recommend doing it as controller actions. Here's why: You may end up being able to make the same action return several different representations. For example, a GetPerson() action could be able to return Person data as XML, JSON, or HTML (and possibly other representations).

This is a common approach in Rails and also in ASPMVC.

Answer 2

You should definitely use Controller actions, here are a couple of reasons why:

• Using WCF/Webservices would just be overkill for doing this (My assumption is that you don't already have any WCF/Webservices code which everyone uses)
• Using controller actions fits naturally in these kind of situations
• You can have an easy fallback if the user has Javascript disabled or an unsupported browser. (By just creating a couple of action methods which return the complete view)
• Also as Michael mentioned you can perform this atomic updates by rendering partials

Hope that helps.