Question

After reading up on the JQGrid control, I decided it would be good to use it in one of my ASP.Net MVC 3 Web applications.

Firstly I followed Phil Haacks tutorial http://haacked.com/archive/2009/04/14/using-jquery-grid-with-asp.net-mvc.aspx which is all good. I then tried to implement something similar into my app, the only difference being, I use Linq To Entities.

My View page has all the css and Jquery classes imported, then I have my JavaScript Function and table which holds the data

<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function () {
    jQuery("#list").jqGrid({
        url: '/Home/LinqGridData/',
        datatype: 'json',
        mtype: 'GET',
        colNames: ['equipmentID', 'categoryTitle', 'title'],
        colModel: [
      { name: 'equipmentID', index: 'equipmentID', width: 40, align: 'left' },
      { name: 'categoryTitle', index: 'categoryTitle', width: 40, align: 'left' },
      { name: 'title', index: 'title', width: 200, align: 'left'}],
        pager: jQuery('#pager'),
        width: 660,
        height: 'auto',
        rowNum: 10,
        rowList: [5, 10, 20, 50],
        sortname: 'Id',
        sortorder: "desc",
        viewrecords: true,
        imgpath: '/scripts/themes/coffee/images',
        caption: 'My first grid'
    });
}); 

<h2>My Grid Data</h2>
<table id="list" class="scroll" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"></table>
<div id="pager" class="scroll" style="text-align:center;"></div>

Then in my controller, I have the following method which is suppose to return the Json data

public ActionResult LinqGridData(string sidx, string sord, int page, int rows)
    {
        AssetEntities context = new AssetEntities();

        var query = from e in context.Equipments
                    select e;

        var count = query.Count();

        var result = new
        {
            total = 1,
            page = page,
            records = count,
            rows = (from e in query
                    select new
                    {
                        id = e.equipmentID,
                        cell = new string[]
                        {
                        e.equipmentID.ToString(),
                        e.Category.categoryTitle,
                        e.Department.title
                        }

                    }).ToArray()
        };

        return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

    }

When I run this, the code falls over with the following error

LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method 'System.String ToString()' method

Does anyone know how to fix this error? And also, am I doing this the correct way, or should I be doing it a different way from the Phil Haack explanation since he is using Linq to SQL?

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks Folks.

Answer 1

EF doesn’t support ToString method, you must retrieve the data without ToString and format

this should work

public ActionResult LinqGridData(string sidx, string sord, int page, int rows)
{
    AssetEntities context = new AssetEntities();

    var query = from e in context.Equipments
                select e;

    var count = query.Count();

    var result = new
    {
        total = 1,
        page = page,
        records = count,
        rows = query.Select(x => new { x.equipamentID, x.Category.categoryTitle,x.Department.title })
                    .ToList() // .AsEnumerable() whatever
                    .Select(x => new { 
                        id = x.equipamentID,
                        cell = new string[] {
                            x.equipamentID.ToString(),
                            x.categoryTitle,
                            x.title
                        }})
                    .ToArray(),
    };

    return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

}