Joe Cincotta: Thoughts and such…

By Stephen Trembath

Just a quick example of using jquery to submit form data without a postback which may (or may not!) be of interest…

It is useful in this case because the page is very big (the page to process a lead/ticket), and we want to avoid doing post-backs wherever possible. It finds all elements in the pnlChecklist panel which have an attribute named ‘metaid’, e.g. <asp:DropdownList runat=”Server” metaid=”Spyware risk” />. It submits the data as a serialized string (metaid1=value1&metaid2=value2) to a very basic code-behind page, which splits and saves the data, and then returns a script for evaluation on the client-side. It’s pretty heavily snipped to make it a little clearer.

Client-side:

<a href="javascript:;" onclick="DoAudit();">Send System Audit to Customer</a>

function DoAudit() {
            var id = $('#<%=Me.hiddenSupportRequestID.ClientID%>').val();
            var serialized = '';
            $('#<%=Me.pnlChecklist.ClientID%> [metaid]').each(
            function() {                 
               var attrib = $(this).attr("metaid");
               serialized += attrib + "=" + $(this).val() + "&";
            }
            );
            $.get(ajaxUrl, { method: 'getaudit', supportrequestid: id, data: serialized }, function(data) {
                // Handle the response
                eval(data);
            });
            return false;
        }

Server-side:

        SecureSession.ValidateOrRedirect()
        Select Case Request.QueryString("method")
            Case "getaudit"
                        Dim data As String = Request.Params.Get("data")
                        Dim htData As Hashtable = AjaxUtils.SplitSerializedPostData(data)
                        ......
                End Select
                Dim script As String = "alert('Test');"
                Response.Write(script)
       End Select