What type of ActionResult should I return from an MVC Action where I want javascript to either redirect or update a div?

Let me first outline my objective from a user's perspective and then the code I have to achieve that goal where its falling short.

I'd like the user to be able to click a button, which brings up a jQuery modal style dialog with a few fields on it and a submit + cancel button. When they successfully commit the record I'd like to have the user redirected to /Records/CustomList/ -- but if there is an error, I'd like the content of the div that is modal to be updated to show the ModelState errors I added and returned.

My question is, since I want to tell my clientside javascript what it should do based on the result of the action, what type should I return from my ActionResult method? I'm thinking a JSON object with two fields, Type and Data so I can write JS like this

if(ret.Type == 1) {
    window.location(ret.Data);
}
else {
    ('#modalDiv').html(ret.Data);
}

Is that a 开发者_运维百科good approach? Is different option I should check out first?

Sounds about right. However the code will probably get a little bit more readable if you return a JSON object that looks more like this:

{
    type : 1,
    href : 'uri-to-redirect-to',
    errormessages : ['error1','error2']
}

And your javascript can look like this

if(ret.type === 1){
    window.location(ret.href);
}else{
    //add error messages to modalDiv
}

Also, don't use the == operator. if(ret.type == true) will evaluate to the same as if(ret.type == 1). This might not matter in this case, but for future reference, stay away from the == operator unless you're absolutely positive you want this kind of functionality.