MVC3: How to Post a Form that contains partial views?

Tools: MVC3, jQuery Unobtrusive Validation, Razor, VS 2010

I am developing an MVC2 project that enables users to request services. I have placed information common to all forms in partial views, which are strongly typed to their own models. Each partial view has its own controller. The partial views are rendered in the main container page. I have unobtrusive jQuery data validation working for all data on the rendered page.

Questions: What is the best way to code a Post that relays all the page data to the server and how can I associate the partial views to their respective models? Is it possible for the controllers for the partial views to handle their own data storage chores? Any good exa开发者_运维技巧mples somewhere? Or, is this architecture flawed and I should rethink?

Thanks in advance,

Arnold

No, not at all, sounds nicely broken up and easy to test. First off, make sure the forms are well set up with the right action, method, etc. in HTML. So then to post the whole page you could do something like this:

var savePage = function () {
    $('form').each(function (formIndex, formElement) {
        var f = $(formElement);
        $.post(f.attr('action'), f.serialize(), successfulFormPost);
    });
};

var successfulFormPost = function (data) { ... };

Now, if your MVC view looks something like this:

(Notice the naming convention for the name attribute). Then you can make your controller for that form take in a strongly typed parameter that matches the view's @Model:

public class SomeModel {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
}

public class SomeController : Controller {
    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult SomeAction(SomeModel someModel) {
        // use someModel.Id, someModel.Description here
    }
}

I did that HTML a little more manually, but I'm just proving a point about binding and linking up HTML POST with controller actions. I'll leave it up to you to bring in unobtrusive validation by using the Html.TextBox type syntax. Just remember to set the name attribute of your input fields according to how the default binder works:

http://www.asp.net/mvc

That's a great source for all these fundamentals.