Populate jQuery modal dialog form

I have a application that contains a gridview. When a user selects one of the items from the gridview, I want to be able to show a jQuery dialog box that contains a form with some pre-filled information from the selected item from the gridview. Right now I have a div with some html text boxes that is set to be a modal dialog box. The user clicks on it, and the selected item's ID is easily to retrieve. The problem comes when I want to go out to the database, get some of the details, then pre-fill in some of the textboxes and other elements before displaying the dialog box to the user.

An easy comparison is having a user click on an item so that they can submit a form to be processed with some of the items from the selection already filled in. I was wondering what the easiest way to go about this is. Right now I have it so that selecting an item from the gridview uses jQuery to do a Ajax post with the ID to a [WebMethod] in the code behind where it can then go off the database and get all the details of the record. The problem is that for obvious reasons the WebMethod can't magically fill in the fields of the form. I could send back all of the information to the ajax query to fill in, but that also feels pretty messy because there is no real strong connection from the random data I send back and which field they belong to.

A lot of this is pondering out loud, but I am really interested in better understandin开发者_开发百科g how to use jQuery and Ajax within ASP.NET.

Thank you for your help and your input.

add an attribute on the gridview button:

  btn.Attributes.Add("onclick","ShowDialog();");

client script

 function ShowDialog(){
      //setup the dialog
$('#dialog).setup(function(){
   ......,
   buttons: "OK", function(){
     //save by calling btn2.click() where btn2 is a hidden button that handles save logic in server side
});
});
      $('#dialog').show();
    return false;
    });