Why and when to use Ajax services and jQuery in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

May be this sounds very stupid question but I'm a student who just came to know about MVC and I find it very interesting. Also, I have very little or no knowledge about Ajax and jQuery. I have been creating some basic applications like posting a comment or a blog post without using Ajax services or jquery. Now I've come to a part where I see Ajax services being called and custom jQuery code are being written.

Let us consider a small example where one can add comment on the main page and after the comment being written and submitted, it appears on main page. Imagine a controller with following functions

public class CustomAjaxController : Controller
    {
        //
        // GET: /CustomAjax/
        private static readonly List<string> Comments = new List<string>(); 
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View(Comments);
        }

        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult AddComment(string comment)
        {
            Comments.Add(comment);

            return RedirectToAction("Index");
        }
    }

I know using list of string to store the comments is not good idea but for the sake of simplicity and to explain my point I've used it. Also I don't have model but again for same reason.

@model IEnumerable<string>



<h4>comments</h4>
<ul id ="comments">
    @foreach (var comment in Model)
    {
        <li>@comment</li>
    }
</ul>
<form method="POST" id="commentsForm"
    action = "@Url.Action("AddComment")">

    @Html.TextArea("Comment", new{rows =5, cols =40})
    <br/>

    <input type ="submit" value="Add comment"/>

</form>

Now, I've seen same thing being done using jquery and ajax requests. But why should i do it to achieve same result, or how do I know this is the right place to use ajax requests.

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-10 13:19:17Z

2

But why should i do it to achieve same result, or how do I know this is the right place to use ajax requests.

AJAX offers a couple of benefits:

It saves bandwidth because only the portion of the page that you want to be updated actually is sent over the wire. In your sample code you are reloading the entire HTML even if only one comment is added on a single place
It is asynchronous meaning that the user can do other things on the page while waiting for the server side processing

You can use it whenever you want to take advantage of one of those things.

answered May 10, 2013 at 13:19

Darin Dimitrov

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2 Comments

Cybercop Over a year ago

So is that why I should check if the request is ajax request and return partial view if the ajax request is true?? which would then probably only refresh the comment section rather than entire page?

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

Yes, exactly. When you return a partial view you are only returning a small fragment of the entire HTML page - only the part that needs to be refreshed. You could also return JSON from the controller action and use this JSON on the client to perform some actions.

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