Display Messages in ASP.NET MVC 3 - asp.net-mvc-3

I am using MVC 3 Razor for my website. My requirement is that I want to show display friendly messages to the user on Success/Failure of the request, on the View itself, don't want to re direct the user to another View. I want like I could customize the display like Green color with some Success image and Red color for failure and respective image.
What would be the best approach?

It sounds like you want to know if a request failed or succeeded based on user input. If you are posting data to the server, you want to consider using the AjaxHelper the BeginForm-method takes an argument of AjaxOptions.
On the AjaxOptions you can specify OnSuccess and OnError among others and when one of these are called, you can call the corresponding JavaScript.
If this on the other hand is not enough, you might want to inspect the data that came from the server and based on that decide if the request succeeded or not, you want to use jQuery and their ajax-components. Here's an example of how to use the jQuery-option:
$.post("/MyController/MyAction", function(data) {
// Check what data contains.
});

Related

Sinatra + Ajax to load dynamic content

I want to create a page with will be filled with dynamic info using Ajax (JQuery). The info will come from various GETs I need to do in other URLs.
I'll be using Sinatra + JQuery to to that, but as my WEB experience is almost null and don't have any idea how do to it right.
The requisites for this are:
Each time a GET completes, a new line of information should appear on the page.
If the GET could not be complete, a default info appear on the page.
My idea so far is to do something like this:
Have my controller performing each GET inside a thread.
Each time a thread ends, with success or not, I inform the view of the result and render a partial
I'll have as many partial as I need (for each GET I must do)
The first time I load the page I fill in the default info, them I update via AJAX with the successful GET responses
This does not seem the correct approach, so I'm asking someone that already did something similar or has more experience on this some help.
You start off with a simple get('/'){} route that holds the default message (or any other GET route). Then you have your other GET routes that you want to display on your default route. In Sinatra you can check whether a request is an xhr-request or not with a request.xhr? If you have an xhr request you return a json value to your view, otherwise reject the request or render a view with proper html. This is on your sinatra backend. In your views you can use JQuery or any other JS library or plain JS to handle asynchronous data requests. You can use the ajax function in JQuery to request data from your routes and then add them to your DOM. It's as simple as that :)
Now you will have to investigate on the JQuery site how to make ajax requests and how to append data to existing DOMs. That's all there is to it.

Codeigniter AJAX and POST

What is the best way to address an AJAX script that sends data to POST in codeigniter? Right now I am loading a view with the AJAX through $this->load->view('AJAX', $data); however there is no UI or user actions in the view. It's simply running through the script and returning POST data a little after the script loads. I receive the POST data in my model where I input the values into the DB and output some other values based on the data.
I need to open a real view, set metatags and re-direct the user to another website afterwards.
How do I address this?
The problem I'm facing is that I cannot open up another view because the AJAX view is the one that's in focus but I need this AJAX view to be temporary that basically does it's thing and sends to POST.
Is there any convention that I can lookup/research to what I'm describing? Let me know what kind of clarification is needed if any.
Some people like to write "ajax" controllers and post to them exclusively, but you don't need to do that. You can handle the request in the same controller that handles the non-ajax request. Personally, I exclusively return json, but you can return chunks of HTML if that works better for you.
Your exact problem is vague (actual code would help clarify), but I think you are on the wrong track. Don't use a view for processing anything ever. Use your Controller layer, this is for handling input and requests.
Example of controller method responding to either ajax or non-ajax request:
function edit_user()
{
$data['status'] = $this->user_model->save();
if ($this->input->is_ajax_request())
{
// return json string with our update status
// Something like: {"status":true}
echo json_encode($data);
exit;
}
// Load the non ajax view with the same data
$this->load->view('users/edit', $data)
}
$this->input->is_ajax_request() is a function of the Input class that reads $_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] and checks if it's value is XMLHttpRequest. This should only be true if it's an "ajax" request.
You can make life easier by wrapping this in a class or function. No matter what you decide to do, don't use the view layer for processing data.
I think my problem is, how do I address javascript without a view? how do I call the script and/or where do I put the JS code in the controller? I felt it was the wrong direction to address the code in a view but I didn't see how else to do it.
Whenever possible, you should put javascript code in a .js file and use a <script> tag to load it, in an HTML document. The only other exception is putting it in a "view" file (a file that's only purpose is to construct your final HTML output). In other words, follow the same rules of HTML as to where to put javascript, and follow the usual conventions of MVC of where HTML belongs (in the view). Javascript code does not belong in your controller. Javascript is not processing your data, it is sending the data to the server.
I need to open a real view, set metatags and re-direct the user to another website afterwards.
If you want to load a view, then redirect (after a certain amount of time I assume), you can do it with javascript or a <meta> tag (but don't use a meta tag, use js).

CodeIgniter jQueryUI dialog form example

I am trying to use CodeIgniter and jQuery-ui dialog to create a modal window with form to update user information.
The process should be like:
1. Press a button on a view page.
2. A modal window pops up.
3. Inside the window is a form that a user can fill.
4. If the user filled something before, the information should be shown in corresponding field
5. Click the update button on the modal window to save the changes to database.
Can anyone provide a good sample of this process?
I used ajax to pass the data but it didn't work when I was trying to update the data to the database. It would be nice if an example of how to pass data from ajax to php and how php handle that.
Thanks,
Milo
well the jquery bit for post(), get(), ajax() works the same in any measure you would normally use it.. key difference here is with CI you can't post directly to a file-name file-location due to how it handles the URI requests. That said your post URL would be the similar to how you would access a view file normally otherwise
ie: /viewName/functionName (how you've done it with controllers to view all along. post, get, ajax doesnt have to end in a extension. I wish I had a better example then this but I can't seem to find one at the moment..
url = '/home/specialFunction';
jQuery.get(url, function(data) {
jQuery("#div2display").html(data);
});
in the case of the above you notice despite it not being a great example that. you have the url with 2 parameters home and specialFunction
home in this case is the controller file for home in the control folder for the home file in views the specialFunction is a "public function" within the class that makes the home controller file. similar to that of index() but a separate function all together. Best way I have found to handle it is through .post() and a callback output expected in JSON cause you can form an array of data on the php side json_encode it and echo out that json_encode and then work with that like you would any JSON output. or if your just expecting a sinlge output and not multiples echoing it out is fine but enough of the end run output thats for you to decide with what your comfortable doing currently. Hopefully all around though this gives you some clairity and hopefully it works out for you.

How can I add a URL parameter but hide others in a POST - Spring MVC

I'm trying to add a URL parameter within a Spring MVC application. It's a basic search page that shows results.
In the search page, there is a form that is set to POST. There are many hidden fields and other fields I don't want in the URL. So, I don't want to do a GET.
I do want the search query in the URL. So after clicking the search button, the resulting search results page needs to have a URL like /search?query=hello
To get it to work, I'm creating a RequestMapping method in the Spring MVC Controller and doing a redirect: tacking on the query parameter. However, I'm not sure using a redirect is the best answer, seems there could be performance concerns redirecting as well.
I looked around and noticed folks using javascript and the location object, but setting the location object obviously relaunches the URL you set it to. I also looked at the HTTPServletResponse & HTTPServletRequest objects, but couldn't find much.
Any thoughts on how I can force the search parameter to be added to the URL?
Your form will have an 'action' specified telling it where to POST to. I'd have thought you could attach an onclick event to your submit button (or an onsubmit event to your form) that updates the action url by appending "?query=" to it.
document.<form name>.action += "?query=...";
Then you just have to worry about someone posting your form without JavaScript enabled - in this case you could fall back to your redirect.
I don't know how the server technology so I can't say if it will be happy giving you both GET and POST parameters, if not you'll have to manually strip the GETs out of the URL.
But anyway, this seems like a rather odd situation to be in - is it really that big a deal to show the parameters in the URL? Anything that gets posted by an HTML form can still be inspected with the right tools, it's just ever so slightly more difficult.
I wanted to provide a more complete answer to my question with code. The previous user helped me down this path, so I'll keep it as the accepted answer. However, there is one item to note:
If you add on to the action, and you have an input text box with the same name, the page posts a duplicate value like: query=hello,hello.
So, I needed to remove the name on the input box, and use the following javascript. Note, I am using the prototype.js framework:
Event.observe(window, 'load', function(event) {
Event.observe('searchForm', 'submit', function(event) {
$('searchForm').action += "?query="+$('searchBox').value;
});

ASP.NET MVC 3 Dynamic Controls and Unobtrusive Validation

Good afternoon everyone. I was wondering if there is anyway to have the MVC framework automatically wire up the data-val* attributes on the controls or do we need to manually create and apply the attributes to dynamic content?
I have a view that initially calls a partial view passing in the main viewmodel. This partial view is bound to a complex property on my main viewmodel. The partial view simply contains a set of cascading dropdown lists. On initial load of the page I have a call to #Html.Partial("PartialName", Model), the two dropdown lists’ validation works perfectly if I try to submit without selecting proper values. I also have another button on the page that if clicked loads another instance of the partial view on the page. If I now try to submit the form these controls, although they are bound to the same model and although I have set the correct .ValidationMessageFor helpers, no validation appears for them since the dropdownlists do not appear to be generated with the data-val* attributes. Is there any way that I can get them to appear correctly? I also noticed that the associated <span /> tag associated to the .ValidationMessageFor is not generated either. Has anyone run into this problem as well, if so how did you resolved?
UPDATE
Here is the javascript function that I call to load the partial on the button's onClick event:
function AddNewVehicle() {
$.ajax({
type: 'GET',
url: '/ReservationWizard/AddVehicleToReservation',
data: $('#reservation-wizard-form').serialize(),
dataType: 'HTML',
async: true,
success: function (data) {
if (data != null) {
$('#vehicle-selection-container').append(data);
}
}
});
}
The problem is that if you are not inside a form context, the HTML helpers such as TextBoxFor do not output any client validation data-* attributes. The first time when the page loads you invoke your Html.RenderPartial inside an Html.BeginForm() but later when you use AJAX to append form elements there is no longer this form context and there won't be any data-* client validation attributes generated. One possible solution would be to put the form inside the partial and then update the entire form during the AJAX call and in the success callback re-parse the client validation rules using $.validator.unobtrusive.parse('#vehicle-selection-container').
But if you want to keep only a single element inside the partial you are pretty much on your own :-) Here's a blog post which covers your scenario that you might take a look at.
So what can I say: unobtrusive client validation is great on paper and Scott Gu's blog posts but at some stage of the development of real world applications people start to realize its limitations. That's one of the reasons why I directly use the jquery.validate plugin and no MS jquery.unobtrusive. And, yes I know that I repeat my server validation logic in the javascript and yes I don't care because I have total control. Oh, and on the server I use FluentValidation.NET instead of data annotations for pretty much the same reasons as the client side part :-)
So maybe some day in MVC 4 Microsoft will finally make validation right (imperative vs declarative) but until this day comes, we just need to be searching for workarounds.

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