I have an existing ASP.NET MVC 2 application that I've been asked to extend. I am adding a new feature to the site where I generate an employee assessment form based on a dynamic list of questions retrieved from our HR system. I have everything working with the exception of validation and posting the responses back to the site. Here's some details:
- I retrieve a list of "Questions" from our back-end system via a web service call.
- Each "Question" contains the text to display as well as the following settings:
- The question Type (corresponds to textbox, textarea, radio button list or checkbox list)
- If comments are allowed
- If an answer is required
- When applicable, the list of possible responses
To generate the form, I use a for-each loop over the list of Questions. I use the value of the QuestionType property to determine which partial view to render (one for each of the types). For example, if QuestionType == SingleChoice, that partial renders the choices as a radio button list. If comments are allowed for the question, I also render an additional textarea field to hold the user's comments.
As I said, rendering the form is working fine but now I need to:
A. Enforce when an answer is required. I'm using DataAnnotations for validation everywhere else in the solution but since I'm not working against a static model, I don't see how I can do that.
B. Post the results back to the site. For each question, there can be text entered into a textbox or textarea, a selected value for a radio button list or multiple selected values for a checkbox list. Plus, each question could also have additional text sent back in the form of a comment.
All of the examples that I've seen working with dynamic "lists" are only concerned with posting a single value for each field and it is always the same type (e.g. a list of textboxes). With the variations I have to support, plus the need to send back the entered/selected value(s) and a comment for each question, I'm stumped.
Any guidance is appreciated.