MVC3 Dropdown drillthrough hierarchy

I have a table for product category that has a hierarchical structure. Each Category_ID may have a number of children determined by their Parent_id. For example Air Fresheners (26) has children 26, 27 and 28 as they have a Parent_id of 25.

I would like to set up a page to drill through the categories with dropdowns. A user would select a level 2 category such as Air Fresheners they would then get a dropdown containing children of the previous selection.

What is the best way to do this? I am considering jQuery and JSON, but there might be a better way.

I have the following GetCategoryChildren method:

public string ThisName { get; set; }
public int ThisHLevel { get; set; }
public IEnumerable<SelectListItem> Children { get; set; }

public GetCategoryChildren(int category_ID)
{
    var rep = new Product_CategoryRepository();
    Children = rep.All.Where(x => x.Parent_id == category_ID).ToList()
                      .Select(x =>开发者_如何学编程 new SelectListItem
            {
                Text = x.Name,
                Value = x.Category_ID.ToString()
            });
    ThisName = rep.All.Where(x => x.Category_ID == category_ID)
                      .FirstOrDefault().Name;
    ThisHLevel = rep.All.Where(x => x.Category_ID == category_ID)
                        .FirstOrDefault().HLevel;
}

Lend me your brains.

Take a look at Project Awesome

The AjaxDropdown does the trick.