Question

As you can see here, I’m allowing a user to dynamically create a table of data, and storing the ids of the table in a hidden field (in the example it’s a text area so you can see it, and the final solution will be Guid rather than integers).

My question is simply this: What data type should I use on the server/MVC action to take the data held in the textarea/hidden field?

At the moment I have a string, and am contemplating doing a load of .split()’ing and whatnot, but it doesn’t feel right!

Ultimately I need some sort of IEnumerable<Guid, Guid> thing?!?! so I can do a foreach and get each pair of Ids.

I’m sure the answer will be simple, but I can’t think of what to do.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

If your UI has multiple, like-named form fields, they will be submitted to your action method and bound properly to an array. We could use string[] for this case.

<form action="">
  <input type="text" name="guids"/>
  <input type="text" name="guids"/>
  <input type="text" name="guids"/>
  <input type="text" name="guids"/>
  <input type="submit" value="Submit"/>
</form>

Then your controller could handle them like so:

public ActionResult MyAction(string[] guids)
{
    guids.Count == 4 // if all four fields were filled in.
}

Note that if there is just a single guids value sent by the form, the string[] guids will still work – it will contain just a single item.

Finally, note that if no values are entered, the array value will be null, not an empty array.