I am working on a mobile website in ASP.NET MVC3. I have a page where i have search bar in my header. this header is coming from my Layout page which is common to all other Views. And inside my specific page, I have page specific content(forms).
For my Customer/Add action, I return the Add View of Customer which is strongly typed to my CustomerViewModel. I will have form tag in my Add View which will be posted to HttpPost Add Action method when form gets submitted. That is fine. My question is how will i handle the search box content ? I believe only one form is allowed in the page.So if i have a SearchViewModel which is binded to my Search View(Partial), It is going to be 2 forms in my page. So i can not do that.
I can handle the search part by reading the content in java script and calling another action to get Search results.Is that the only way to do that ? I am worried about those devices where java script is disabled. What should i do ? Please advice
No. You can have more than 1 form on the page. In fact, here you should. Your Add Customer page should submit to 1 action method, but your search form should submit to a different action method.
If you are familiar with webforms, that framework only allows you to have 1 form on the page, but not because HTML requires it. Webforms requires it because it is the only way the framework can carry all of the data from various server controls across POST requests (using ViewState). Webforms has historically not been very HTML or HTTP friendly.
You just can’t have forms nested within other forms in HTML, but it is completely legal (and recommended in MVC) to have more than 1 form on a page.
As for AJAX, I would not worry about devices that do not have javascript enabled. There are only like 6 or 7 people on the planet that don’t have javascript on their web devices, and if someone disables javascript, they won’t be able to experience 99% of the rest of the web anyhow.