Question

I have the following in my Action:

[AjaxException] 
public ActionResult DoSomething(sring someParam1, string someParam2) {

    //do whatever you need to do here, db etc
    return new EmptyResult();
}

in my html

<form id="search-frm" name="search-frm" action="@Url.Action("DoSomething", "MyActions")" method="post" >

    <input type="button" id="search-btn" value="search" class="btn" onclick="DoSomething();return false;" />
    <input type="text" name="param1" id="param1" />
    <input type="text" name="param2" id="param2" />
</form>

in my JS

function DoSomething() {  
   $("#search-frm").submit();
   return false;
}

When I click on the button, and after the controller action DoSomething is done, I get redirected to MyActions/DoSomething. Is there a way to not have that w/o using jquery $.ajax? I simply need to do something and not go away from the existing page.

Answer 1

because your code is so. When you click on the button you are calling the DoSomething javascript function and inside that you are submitting the form. So it is same as the normal form submit(clicking on the submit button to submit). that is the reason it is redirecting (actually being posted to DoSomething action.

If you do not want to navigate away from the current page, you may use ajax to do your posting and get result and stay in the same page. So i would make changes to your code like this

1) Get rid of the OnClick event binding from the HTML markup

2) Add this javascript which handles the form submit

$(function(){
  $("#search-frm").submit(e){

   e.preventDefault();  // prevent the default form posting. Let's stay here
   $.post("@Url.Action("DoSomething","MyActions")",$("#search-frm").serialize(), function(data){
          //do something with the response data 
   });

  });     
});

Not sure why return EmptyResult from the Action method. You may need to return some valid response which indicates the status of the Action you are trying to perform.

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult DoSomething(string param1,string param2)
{
  //do something 
   return Json(new 
             { Status= true,
               Message="Succesfully saved"
             });      
}

You may keep a generic ViewModel to return such results and use that, instead of dynamically typing like above.

public class OperationStatus
{
  public bool Status  { set;get;}
  public string Message { set;get;}
}

and in your action method

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult DoSomething(string param1,string param2)
{
  //do something 
  var res=new OperationStatus();
  res.Status=true;
  res.Message="Successfully Added";
   return Json(res);      
}