I have a fairly complex form on my ASP.NET MVC Page. It works like this...
On default load (no HTTP post), it has two select boxes, bound to the Model, and a submit button.
On submit (HTTP post), the values in the select boxes are used to pull some data from the DB. That data is then added to the model instance that was posted, and the instance is used to issue another View(myModelInstance) call.
At this point, things look good. My select boxes retained the selected values, and the new elements based on the DB data are displaying.
If I do another post now, whether I change data or not, the original values selected in the select boxes are null within the Action method of my controller, but the values for the DB data textboxes are not.
The only thing I am really doing special here is using the index notation within Razor to be able to edit parts of my Model that are within an IEnumerable...as in the following example...
#for (int i = 0; i < ViewBag.SomeArbitraryNumber; i++)
{
<input type="text" name="myModel.MyEnumerable[#i].MyValue"
value="#(Model.MyEnumerable[i].MyValue)" size="2" />
}
This indexed notation usage only happens after the original select box values have been posted.
UPDATE:
It seems that the major contributor here is the special index notation. If I eliminate it, it works fine. Also, if I include additional hidden fields to match the two select boxes, and also use the indexed notation for those, the second post works.
Is it possible that your browser is caching the original select boxes, and they were never populated by your second view? In MVC you have to populate the select boxes every time they are displayed. In Webforms, viewstate does this for you automagically, but in MVC it is up to you to make sure they are populated.
Related
I am currently working on a project in ServiceNow that requires me to configure around 500 descendants of the Configuration Item table by adding multiple form sections to the CI's with around 10-20 fields in each of these form sections. I currently am doing this by going into the Form Design for each CI, and manually adding these form section and fields for every CI individually, which takes far to long to do for 500 CI's.
Is there a way to add a form section to multiple CI's without having to go into the form design on every CI you want to change and adding it manually?
Technical answer: yes, because all of that form layout data is stored in tables (sys_ui_form_section, sys_ui_section, sys_ui_element, etc) that you could script to insert relevant records. However, due to the complexity (form sections, form elements, ordering) and the potential to run into conflicts (forms differ between tables), I would recommend this only as a last resort.
I think the real question is why is it required to have all of those fields displayed on the forms? If you're populating data from Discovery or a large import, can those fields just be visible by a list page, or just be available to use in filters? Will users actually be clicking to view a CI record and need to see that data on the form? The other part to consider is which view you are adding all of these form sections and fields to. As an example, a user won't see the data on a reference field hover if you're only making changes to the Default view, and won't see any of the fields on a mobile device if you don't add to the Mobile view.
I have a bit of a unique challenge today. I have a client that wants to be able to search for multiple items based on inserts into a cfgrid. Suppose we have the following web form:
A Country selection dropdown
A State Selection dependent AJAX dropdown
A city Selection dependent AJAX dropdown
An ADD Button
----------------------------------------------------
A CFGRID that will populate a row with selections when the user clicks the add button
----------------------------------------------------
And finally, a CLEAR button, and a GO button on the bottom.
The resulting page will then query the database and get some statistics about the cities selected. So, suppose an individual picks USA > Arizona > Scottsdale and USA > Arizona > Flagstaff. The grid below the options will 'save' each selection and reset to their default options, waiting for a user to pick additional options or click on 'GO'.
The resulting page will then generate columns that list some statistics about the communities and highlight the 'best of' between each selected community.
Each time a user selects the ADD button (assuming three criteria are selected) I want the information to be added into a CFGRID that displays the options selected. Then, After the user selects at least one country/city/state option, have all of the data in the CFGRID get passed to another page that does a query from the data selected. In theory, the user could pick as many communities as they want, assuming they are willing to let the database sludge through enough data to get what they want and wait through a 'loading' screen to get it.
I'm having these challenges, in no particular order:
- I have an HTML grid that I must use per client spec (No Java or Flash, must be HTML)
- I have no idea how to get the selected options into the CFGRID. I assume there is some JavaScript I can write that uses some sort of AddRow function to add data into the grid with the add button but cannot seem to find how to it on the interwebs
- After we conquer the above challenge, how do I pass the data from the grid into the results page? I thought about passing one big string or a structure, but I'm not sure how to do that through the URL or posting, nor how to get the data out of the grid. I wonder if I am better off coding some sort of string that gets passed from the options page to the results page with a get method instead of dealing with the stuff in the CFGRID and have the CFGRID serve only as a 'dummy' display container.
- Finally, after the pass is complete, I would need to loop through through the structure and perform a CFQUERY or CFSTOREDPROC on each row of data, then get the statistics I need to display on the results page. I assume this would depend on how I am getting the data from the options selection page to the results page.
THANK YOU ALL!
CFGRID is great to start, but it can be b*tch to customize and extend... Have you tried editable CFGRID with bind? See how far off it is from what you want first. If it turns out to be very far, then you might want to go for a jqGrid and code up some jQuery.
To start, read Using HTML grids and make the cfgrid editable.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/Developing/WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-7a01.html#WSc3ff6d0ea77859461172e0811cbec22c24-72e0
Once you got that working, look at these provided JS functions that you can use with CFGRID
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WS0ef8c004658c1089-6262c847120f1a3b244-8000.html
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WSd160b5fdf5100e8f-4439fdac128193edfd6-7f5f.html
If you still demand a bit more, you might need to dig into the underlying ExtJS component. At that point I would rather use jqGrid
I found out that the best way to handle this was by using a SerializeJSON call and a Deserialize JSON call back and forth. By using JavaScript notation we are able to pass a complex JavaScript object (array) between one page and another. This has the value add of not having to worry about sessions timing out and making URLs clickable from one solution to the next.
I am buiding a UI screen for editing the details of an Ecommerce Order. The model for my view (OrderModel) has everything I need (in properties that are also ViewModels), but the UI isn't designed to be able to edit all of it at once.
For example, one part of the UI is for customer data..another for order details, and another for tracking information, each having their own "Save" buttons.
I realize that I could use one giant form and use hidden form fields to populate the non-editable fields, making each "Save" button post all the data, but that smells bad.
I'd like to segment the editable chunks into smaller ViewModels that are posted and validated individually while retaining the strong typing but I'm unsure of how to achieve this in MVC3. Will I need partial views that are called from the primary view?
FYI, I'm using ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor syntax and client side FluentValidation.
Partial Views are a good solution. You can pass different ViewModels to each partial view. But if only sections of the overall view are updated at a time I would not do a post back on the whole page. Instead I would use Ajax calls using JQuery/Javascript to update the individual information back to the controller. I would also look into something like Knockout.js to handle the data binding on the page.
I have a Model that contains some string fields and a List. In the view I use EditFor for the fields, and want to use WebGrid for the List.
Display works fine. But then I use jQuery client-side to let the user add rows to the table generated by the webgrid, which also show up fine on the UI.
However these rows don't appear to be tied back to my model's List upon a submit. In the controller I see that the posted model's string fields contain whatever was entered by the user. But the model's List is empty - it doesn't contain the original values nor the newly added values.
How can I cause the model posted back to the controller to be fully populated, including whatever the webgrid-generated table looks like now, just like fields are?
I see several other questions like this for webgrid on the forum, but none with an answer.
I suppose you are comming from WebForms world. Well this is different in MVC. Here you are back to plain old html and its input fields. No viewstate to hold your rows. Check this link: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/10/23/model-binding-to-a-list.aspx.
Basically you need have consecutive index (or ID) for each row.
I'm trying to build a fairly complex form which as a couple of cascading selects - i.e. the user selects a value in one combo and the other combo is populated according to their first selection.
I've followed a tutorial on how to handle the cascading but the problem I have is that I now have nested forms (the code in the tutorial uses forms inside partial views to POST to a controller action to load the 2nd combo). I have my main form on which I want to collect the input values but also the nexted forms for the cascading select boxes. The problem I have is that the cascading selection doesn't post to the correct controller action, but instead posts to my main (outer) form's action.
I understand this is the correct behaviour for a browser (as nested forms apparently aren't supported) but what's the correct way to implement this?
The correct way is to only have one form. Then use AJAX to populate the cascading drop down list. The are 100s of examples online how to do this with JSON
use this to have multiple submit buttons on one form which each have different controller actions to post to:
http://iwayneo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/aspnet-mvc-action-selector-with-list.html
as for cascading stuff - i would focus on populating these without Ajax 1st - then you can worry about adding this sort of flare - if it doesn't work without JS anyway you're in a bad place.
I would have the 1st dropdown populated when you initially load the form and have a "next" button to populate the next dropdown in the cascade. this submit can use the method above to post to an action which then populates the second data set based on the selection of the 1st dropdown.
make sense?
Then how you ajax that after the point is up to you but you'll have a very solid foundation to build up stuff like that as you will have it working in the minimal tech scenario.
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