Question

In my ASP.NET MVC 3 application, I have an action that is triggered through a jQuery AJAX POST request. In this action, I check some DB data with the attributes, and if it passes the validation, I return a PartialView result that is set inside a div on the view in the success callback of the jQuery request. What I want to do is, if it does not pass validation, fully redirect the user to another page in my application.

I know I could do this through Javascript by passing a value to the view, and doing an extra check there, but I would like to know if it can be done on server-side.

Answer 1

In your contorller action you could return either a PartialView or a JsonResult pointing to the controller action to redirect to:

public ActionResult SomeAction()
{
    if (HasPassedValidation)
    {
         // everything went fine => let's return a partial view
         // that will be updated
         return PartialView();
    }

    // something went wrong with the validation => 
    // we return a JsonResult pointing to the controller
    // action we want to redirect to
    var result = new 
    { 
        redirectTo = Url.Action("SomeOtherAction", "SomeController") 
    };

    return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

and then inside the success callback of your AJAX call test in which case you are and take respective steps:

success: function(result) {
    if (result.redirectTo) {
        // the controller action returned a JSON result => there was an error
        // => let's redirect
        window.location.href = result.redirectTo;
    } else {
        // everything went fine => let's update the DOM with the partial
        $('#results').html(result);
    }
}