Question

I’m working on an ASP.NET MVC3 app, and I’d like to make a call from the view to the controller and store that information as a Dictionary.

Controller code:

public Dictionary<string,int> foo()
{
    Dictionary<string,int> bar = new Dictionary<string,int>();
    bar.Add("test",100);
    return bar;
}

View code:

@{ Dictionary<string,int> foobar = Html.Action("foo"); }
...
<div>@foobar["test"]</div>

I can get the view to work if I use var foobar = Html.Action("foo");, but then it just says that foobar is of type System.Web.Mvc.MvcHtmlString, so I can’t do much with it.

Is there any built-in functionality that I’m missing, or should I just use something like a JSON result for this?

EDIT: Additional Info

It should be noted also, that in the VS2010 debugger, it recognizes foobar properly as {System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary'2[System.String,System.Int32]}, so the issue is that foobar isn’t resolving correctly. The error thrown is:

Compiler Error Message: CS0021: Cannot apply indexing with [] 
to an expression of type 'System.Web.Mvc.MvcHtmlString'

EDIT 2

These are the errors that came with casting the result to a dictionary:

Url.Action("foo").ToDictionary<string,int>(); returned CS1501: No overload for method 'ToDictionary' takes 0 arguments for obvious reasons, but the VS2010 debugger recognizes that the result is a Dictionary:

But when I add parameters (Url.Action("foo").ToDictionary<string,int>(x=>x);), it stops recognizing that it is a dictionary, although I’m not sure those are the proper params (it’s based off what I found here.

Answer 1

You should try as much as possible to keep views dumb. The controller has to push the data to the view. For some reason if you want to perform call a function that performs complex calculations then a better idea would be create a separate static class and move the function from controller to that class. The Html.Action is for entirely a different purpose. Your controllers should always return action results not dictionaries or other types.