Question

i have an Ajax ActionLink which normally just returns a PartialView (which is just a UserControl ascx file) however, my needs have changed and i want to return another PartialView (so a total of two PartialViews) that occupy different areas of my page… of course i can’t call ” return PartialView(“UserControl.ascx”) ” twice in a row consecutivelly… so my question is what would be an elegant work around for this?

how can i return two PartialViews WITHOUT wrapping these two PartialViews up in a larger parent view? i hesitate to do this because both items are in a different part of the html table which would require me to include practically the entire page in the parent view due to the structure of the table, and in this case lots of html data unnecessarily would be sent to the browser at each request – defeating the purpose of an ajax call/partial update (correct me if i’m wrong).

Answer 1

Im sorry I misread, i thought you wanted to call an action method statically. If you want to update 2 parts with one click then I dont really now how you would do it with the included apis. What you could do is create a little javascript (jquery!) that takes over the link´s click, and then have the script load the render page with ajax.

I´ll post an example in a few minutes 😛

<script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

        $(document).ready(function () {

              $("#TheLink").click(){        
                    $("#PlaceToUpdate1").load("/Controller/Method/View1");
                    $("#PlaceToUpdat2").load("/Controller/Method/View2");

              }

            });
        }); 
    </script>

im not sure if that will work exactly like that (no compiler, just top of my head) but its something like that. Of course the link should be a dummy link that doesnt do anything, since the script is the one actually doing it (though you can intercept the links methods if you send back a false or something like that)