Question

My application needs to do an HTTP post of a table with checkboxes like in the image above. On the controller side I will need to traverse the table and perform certain operations for each row that was checked.

The things that I need to do are:

1. Identify whether a row is checked
2. Get the cell values of a checked row

I have a good understanding on how this will be done in Razor in as far as posting the form is concerned. But I am clueless once I am in my controller’s action method.

Please help. Thanks.

Answer 1

From what you’ve show, it appears that all you really need in your action method is a collection of ids to identify which “rows” to modify. I’d use a series of checkboxes with values set to the id of the row they represent. Presumably you have some sort of persistence mechanism in which these rows can be looked up or have them cached server side.

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Update( List<int> rowIDs ) // where your checkboxes are named rowIDs
{
     var messages = DB.Messages.Where( m => rowIDs.Contains( m.ID ) );
     foreach (var message in messages)
     {
        // process the update
     }

     DB.SaveChanges();
     return RedirectToAction( "index" ); // display the updated list
}

Note that it’s more likely that you have a model with the collection of ids as well as some other data representing what “update” to perform. Posting collections can be tricky; you might need to play with the name of the input and/or with hidden indexes if you’re not getting all the data posted back as expected.