Question

I have passed DIctionary to my view using a viewbag item.

In my view I am them converting back to Dictionary:

var date = veiwbag.Dictionary as Dictionary;

My dcitionary is set up as:
Key = string of date (“MMM yyyy”) eg – SEP 2012
value = int – which is a count of entries in database where the date matches the key.

I am abel to output these Key value pairs. I need to know ho wwhen suer sleects an entry I can return the string Key to an aciton method to retrieve all dates for that string.

I’m new to MVC3 so am a bit lost.

My initial thinking was along the lines of:
(this syntax may be slightly wring as doing from memory)

<a href="(@Href("/Posts/Previous/"+ @date.Key))">@date.key (@date.value)</a>

my controller has action:

public ActionResult Previous(string date)
{
       ..work on data

      return View(..my results);

}

the code in the ActionResult is fine . The link takes me to my ActionResult but the string is null. How do I pass the

date.key 

into the ActionResult as a string variable? Am I going about this all the wring way?

Answer 1

You could use a HTML helper to generate a proper link to this controller action:

@Html.ActionLink(
    string.Format("{0} ({1})", date.key, date.value), 
    "Previous", 
    new { date = date.Key }
)

And if you need to specify the controller name as well you could use the following overload:

@Html.ActionLink(
    string.Format("{0} ({1})", date.key, date.value), 
    "Previous", 
    "Posts",
    new { date = date.Key },
    null
)

Assuming default routes have been setup this will generate the following markup:

<a href="/Posts/Previous?date=SEP%202012">SEP 2012 (9)</a>

and when the Previous controller action is invoked it will successfully be passed the date parameter of SEP 2012.