2014. január 29., szerda

Returning more views in an ASP.NET MVC action

Demo and download: pulzonic.com/multipartial
Nuget package: www.nuget.org/packages/Multipartial

Introduction


Recently, we have had a web-based project on which a very few of us (developers) worked. One of the most important goals was to create a complex UI like Facebook, but we didn't want to build a complicated, heavy weight client-side code, so we decided to minimize the amount of JavaScript code, and to render the HTML content on the server-side instead. My plan was to slice the page into many, nested, sometimes very small (like a single line in a listbox) partial views, and transfer the final HTML snippets to the client side, using very simple JS .ajax functions, and doing most of the work on the server-side.

Pretty soon, I understood that the built-in ActionResults of the MVC framework aren't suitable for this at all, so I have created an own solution.