Question

I am creating a .Net web service to receive and process serialized form data from JQuery.form.js which has a couple of multiselects contained within the form.

The serialized data sent to the webservice includes content like this:

&travelwith=4&travelwith=5&travelwith=6

for the field ‘travelwith’ showing that a multi-selection of 3 items out of 10 available in the form’s select field.

Can I construct a strong typed class with the following for instance:

public class StoreUserSet
{
public Array travelwith { get; set; }
public string otherfield { get; set; }
....
}

and then have my web method take the object like this:

StoreUserSet StUserSet = new StoreUserSet(); // Create new class instance.

[WebMethod()]
public bool ProfSet1(StoreUserSet StUserSet)
{
...
}

Would the various values of the multiselect field ‘travelwith’ automatically be parsed into the Array travelwith of the class so that I can save the 3 item values as a comma separated list into SQL via LINQ ?

I haven’t got this far yet.. thought I’d get feedback on my planned approach.

Thanks for any feedback,
Martin.

Answer 1

ok, seeing as my KeyLargo site’s JQuery form contained both single select form data and multiple selects, I needed to be able to store the multiple selects in a single field within Sql.

I ran into problems trying to handle the multiple selects on the server using Array type for storing the data in a Sql single field with a comma delimited string. So the way I solved my question above was to create the strongly typed class with string[] to capture the serialized multi select data passed via AJAX to the server:

public class StoreUserSet
{
public string[] travelwith { get; set; }
public string otherfield { get; set; }
....
}

I used Rick Strahl’s handy method to handle multiselect array data being passed from the client:

public static string[] FormMultiple(this  NameValue[] formVars, string name)
{
var matches = formVars.Where(nv => string.Equals(nv.name, name,
StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)).Select(nv => nv.value).ToArray();
return (0 == matches.Length) ? null : matches;
}

To iterate through the array setting values like this:

profile_travelwith = formVars.FormMultiple("profile_travelwith");

Then joined the values in the multi select string[] arrays like this:

profile_travelwith = string.Join(",", StUserSet.profile_travelwith);

Easily enabling me to save the data into the relevant table fields of the profile.