Question

Currently using MVC3 and using jQuery $.post function to send the ajax request to the controller action called “SearchInitiated”. I’m having a little bit of a head-scratcher here because I’m not sure exactly where my issues lies. I’m sure its something minor that I have overlooked.

When I call my Controller method from an AJAX call, I am passing a json object (stringified) to a controller action. See below:

Request Headers from Chrome

Accept:/ Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded;
charset=UTF-8 User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64)
AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko)

Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17

X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest

Form Dataview

connectorId:1

sessionId:97e2d8b2-be9e-4138-91ed-42ef9c6a2cd6

party:
{“Tag”:null,”PartyIdentifier”:”1″,”Address”:null,”Address2″:null,”BusinessName”:””,”CellPhoneNumber”:null,”CIF”:””,”City”:null,”Country”:null,”DateOfBirth”:null,”EMailAddress”:null,”EmploymentTitle”:null,”EmployerAddress”:null,”EmployerAddress2″:null,”EmployerCity”:null,”EmployerName”:null,”EmployerPhoneNumber”:null,”EmployerState”:null,”EmployerZip”:null,”Fax”:null,”Firstname”:”TEST”,”Lastname”:”USER”,”MailingAddress”:null,”MailingAddress2″:null,”MailingCity”:null,”MailingState”:null,”MailingZip”:null,”Middlename”:null,”PhoneNumber”:null,”State”:null,”TIN”:”1111111″,”WorkPhoneNumber”:null,”Zip”:null}

javascript

 var parties =    @(Html.Raw(Json.Encode(Model.SearchParties)));
      function SearchForCustomer(id)
      {

      var currentSelectedParty = GetPartyById(id)
      //SearchPost is a wrapper for $.ajax using default values for dataType and contentType
      SearchPost(URL, {
                'connectorId': '@Model.ConnectorId',
                'sessionId': '@Model.SessionId',            
                'party' :  JSON.stringify( currentSelectedParty ) 
            }
      }

Controller

 public ActionResult SearchInitiated(int connectorId, string sessionId, SearchParty party)
 {
     code here....
 }

 public class SearchParty
    {
        public SearchParty();
        public SearchParty(string lastname, string firstname);

        public string Address
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
           public string City
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
        public string Country
        {
            get;
            set;
        }
        public string DateOfBirth
        {
            get;
            set;
        }

        .... etc etc
}

However, the party object is null.

If I change the code to the following, everything deserializes correctly into the strongly typed object.

 public ActionResult SearchInitiated(int connectorId, string sessionId, string party)
 {
     JavaScriptSerializer json_serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
            SearchParty sp =
                   json_serializer.Deserialize<SearchParty>(party);
 }

I know my json string is valid since it is working in the second code snippet and the value is being passed in the call. What else could I be missing?

Answer 1

I resolved my error by modifying the javascript ajax call to this:

 SearchPost(URL, JSON.stringify( {
            'connectorId': '@Model.ConnectorId',
            'sessionId': '@Model.SessionId',            
            'party' :   currentSelectedParty  
        }))

I needed to stringify the entire data object sent in the ajax call, not just the ‘party’ object