Question

Say you have a page like the question page of Stackoverflow, where the user can either vote up or down, insert new input, edit messages, delete comments or whatever. Given that the page should work both w/ and w/o javascript, how would you organize the controller page in an asp.net mvc web site?

Answer 1

All action would be posts, and they would redirect back to the action that called them.

public ActionResult Index(int pageID){
   return View();//the question page
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Upvote(int pageID, int messageID){
   //update message votes
   return RedirectToAction("Index", new { @pageID = pageID } );
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Downvote(int pageID, int messageID){
   //update message votes
   return RedirectToAction("Index", new { @pageID = pageID } );
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult PostComment(int pageID, int parentMessageID){
   //add comment to parent message
   return RedirectToAction("Index", new { @pageID = pageID } );
}

All my button in my page would be actionlinks that call these post actions. Then I would add javascript to intercept the button clicks and handle via AJAX (so page doesn’t need a reload) that way, without javascript the buttons will still work and just cause a page reload