Question

Put it simply: I’d like to let the user to select some tags in JS and submit it to my controller. Here are my suggestions:

• Create a hidden input for every inserted tag with naming convention like: Tag123 (123 = this tag’s unique identifier) and iterate through FormCollection in my action method to find out which tags have been selected. Cons are obvious: using FormCollection instead of ViewModel and iterating through the FormCollection to get my desired data seems bad to me.
• Create one hidden input and append every selected tag to it. This can become messy on tags deletion since I should find the right id from the input’s current value and delete it. But the Pro is that I only have one element and can put it in a viewmodel to access it in controller action.
• Curious to see if anyone knows how SO does it. They’re kind of defning the standards now. Would love to know how they do it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I have a website running with the option of adding tags, much like SO.
My approach to the problem, however, led to me create one input field for each added tag, and increment a javascript index variable every time a new input is added, then making use of a ViewModel to bind a IList<TagDTO> tags { get; set; } (forms tend to get complex over time anyway, so a viewmodel is almost always a good way to go). Here is an example of the html hidden inputs created in the page:

name=tags.Index, value=0
name=tags[0].tagid, value=201
name=tags.Index, value=2
name=tags[2].tagid, value=307

This has one great advantage to me: Internationalized tags and possibly disallowing nonexistent tags.
What I mean is that every tag has an ID, and in my “Tags” table in the database there is one column for the name of this tag in each language I support. Such as:

tagid | name_ptBR   | name_en
 201  | animais     | animals
 307  | educacional | educational

This is only my approach to the problem, but it has worked out ok so far.