How do I trigger a PostBack with arguments from Javascript?

This is what I'm doing: Using jquery, I'm popping up a "form" over the page that lets the user search for branches of the company and select the one they want. When the form pops up, they can type in a textbox, and it will do AJAX requests back to the se开发者_StackOverflowrver to return the top n results for what they've entered, and those results will be put into a list for them. I want the user to be able to select one by clicking a link that says "select" or something, and at that point I want it to do a PostBack have the Branch Selector control that this is in change it's SelectedBranch property to the newly selected branch. I've got this all working right now with a hard coded list of LinkButtons, but how do I do the same thing with a dynamic list of links inserted with jquery?

Look at the HTML that gets emitted for your hard coded LinkButtons. You'll see that each one calls the JavaScript __doPostBack function when clicked. I believe this function takes two arguments: a control ID and an extra command argument you can use for your own purposes.

I would suggest adding a single control to the page whose only job is handling events for the dynamic links. Then, when you are creating the links with jquery, make each one call __doPostBack, passing the event handling control's ID for the first argument and some other string for the second argument that identifies which link was clicked. In the Click event for the handling control, look at the second argument value and do what you need to do.

The short answer is... you don't.

ASP.NET relies on the Viewstate for the current state of the controls, including items in a DropDownList or similar control. Dynamically updating a list on the client will not modify the viewstate, so will not be available on the back end.

The general workaround for this is to just add a hidden field which updates/stores the current selection via js on the client side. Then read it from this field on the backend rather than List.SelectedValue.