Question

Folks,
Can anyone help me or direct me to an example of a knockout viewmodel which contains an array of objects being passed to an asp.net mvc action? The only examples I have seen show just simple arrays of strings being passed.
Thanks

Answer 1

Here’s an example from the official Knockout site. It’s a Contacts editor build with nested arrays. [jsFiddle].

A fitting ASP.NET MVC Action could look like

public ActionResult SaveContacts(IEnumerable<Contact> contacts)

Where Contact is defined as the class:

public class Contact
{
    public string firstName { get; set; }
    public string lastName { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<Number> phones { get; set; }
}

Where Number is defined as the class:

public class Number
{
    public string type { get; set; }
    public string number { get; set; }
}

Given the JavaScript Knockout View Model from the example. Your save method could look like this

self.save = function() {
    var jsonString = ko.mapping.toJSON(this.searchParams);
    $.ajax({
        url: "/MyController/SaveContacts",
        data: jsonString,
        type: 'POST',
        contentType: 'application/json',
        dataType: 'json'
    });
};