ASP.NET MVC controller actions that return JSON or

Question

I am trying to create controller actions which will return either JSON or partial html depending upon a parameter. What is the best way to get the result returned to an MVC page asynchronously?

Answer 1

To answer the other half of the question, you can call:

return PartialView("viewname");

when you want to return partial HTML. You'll just have to find some way to decide whether the request wants JSON or HTML, perhaps based on a URL part/parameter.

Answer 2

You may want to take a look at this very helpful article which covers this very nicely!

Just thought it might help people searching for a good solution to this problem.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/15/adaptive-rendering-in-asp-net-mvc.aspx

Answer 3

I think you should consider the AcceptTypes of the request. I am using it in my current project to return the correct content type as follows.

Your action on the controller can test it as on the request object

if (Request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/html")) {
   return View();
}
else if (Request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/json"))
{
   return Json( new { id=1, value="new" } );
}
else if (Request.AcceptTypes.Contains("application/xml") || 
         Request.AcceptTypes.Contains("text/xml"))
{
   //
}

You can then implement the aspx of the view to cater for the partial xhtml response case.

Then in jQuery you can fetch it passing the type parameter as json:

$.get(url, null, function(data, textStatus) {
        console.log('got %o with status %s', data, textStatus);
        }, "json"); // or xml, html, script, json, jsonp or text

Hope this helps James

Answer 4

For folks who have upgraded to MVC 3 here is a neat way Using MVC3 and Json

Answer 5

    public ActionResult GetExcelColumn()
    {            
            List<string> lstAppendColumn = new List<string>();
            lstAppendColumn.Add("First");
            lstAppendColumn.Add("Second");
            lstAppendColumn.Add("Third");
  return Json(new { lstAppendColumn = lstAppendColumn,  Status = "Success" }, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
            }
        }

Answer 6

Alternative solution with incoding framework

Action return json

Controller

    [HttpGet]
    public ActionResult SomeActionMethod()
    {
        return IncJson(new SomeVm(){Id = 1,Name ="Inc"});
    }

Razor page

@using (var template = Html.Incoding().ScriptTemplate<SomeVm>("tmplId"))
{
    using (var each = template.ForEach())
    {
        <span> Id: @each.For(r=>r.Id) Name: @each.For(r=>r.Name)</span>
    }
}

@(Html.When(JqueryBind.InitIncoding)
  .Do()
  .AjaxGet(Url.Action("SomeActionMethod","SomeContoller"))
  .OnSuccess(dsl => dsl.Self().Core()
                              .Insert
                              .WithTemplate(Selector.Jquery.Id("tmplId"))
                              .Html())
  .AsHtmlAttributes()
  .ToDiv())

Action return html

Controller

    [HttpGet]
    public ActionResult SomeActionMethod()
    {
        return IncView();
    }

Razor page

@(Html.When(JqueryBind.InitIncoding)
  .Do()
  .AjaxGet(Url.Action("SomeActionMethod","SomeContoller"))
  .OnSuccess(dsl => dsl.Self().Core().Insert.Html())
  .AsHtmlAttributes()
  .ToDiv())