Query String from BeginForm in MVC 3

Question

I want to use BegingForm with Get method and this is what I do

@using (Html.BeginForm("Search","Home",FormMethod.Get))
{ 
   //My input elements

}

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Search(string queryString)
    {
    }

}

but query string always comes back as null. I think, I need to do something with route but no luck

routes.MapRoute(
            "SearchRoute", // Route name
            "Home/Search{queryString}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Search", filter = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
            );

Obviously, the coming url to the server is something like

Home/Search?query="blah"&query2="blah"&query3="blah"

What am I doing wrong? What is the correct way to get the query parameters in my controller when I want to use get with beginform?

Also, what if the content of my BeginForm can change and so the query string parameter names could be different depending on the rendered page but I want one Search method that analyze the query string and do the right thing?

Also, is a way for them to query parameters to come in a dictionary?

Darin Dimitrov · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-28 22:25:04Z

1

Obviously, the coming url to the server is something like Home/Search?query="blah"&query2="blah"&query3="blah"

That's how HTML <form> with method GET works and this has nothing to do with ASP.NET MVC, it's plain HTML. You can't do much about it other than having your controller action look like this:

public ActionResult Search(SearchViewModel model)
{
    ...
}

Where SearchViewModel will contain properties for each input field on this form. Also you don't need this SearchRoute as it won't work that way.

This being said you could probably use javascript in order to subscribe for the onsubmit event of the form, cancel the default submission (which exhibits the behavior you are observing currently), manually fetch all the values inside your form and then manually generate the url you want and redirect to it using window.location.href = '....';. I am mentioning this only for completeness but absolutely not as something that I recommend or that you should ever do.

answered Jul 28, 2011 at 22:25

Darin Dimitrov

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2 Comments

iCode Over a year ago

Are you saying mvc framework can automatically deserialize my query string to SearchViewModel? Do I need to decorate SearchViewModel in anyway to make this happen? Would you please refer me to any doc on how to map the query string to SearchViewModel?

Darin Dimitrov Over a year ago

@Mike Dotnet, yes, that's what the default model binder does. You don't have to decorate anything. You just must ensure that the name of the properties on this model correspond to the names of the input fields inside your HTML <form>. But of course if you use strongly typed helpers such as Html.TextBoxFor and pass a lambda expression to generate those input fields the framework will take care of properly naming them so tat you don't have to worry about it.

David Anderson · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-30 03:30:04Z

0

If you want to get the items from the query string, just use the "Request" object from the ControllerBase:

    public ActionResult Search()
    {
         var queries = new List<string>();
         foreach (var parameter in Request.QueryString)
         {
             queries.Add(parameter.ToString());
         }
         //Do Stuff with the query parameters...
         return View("Index");
    }

And "Request.QueryString" is a dictionary just as you wanted :)

answered Jul 30, 2011 at 3:30

David Anderson

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