Question

This seems like a simple problem but I have a coder’s mental block:

The concept:

I type a URL, i.e – http://www.mysite.com/getStuff?name=Jerry&occupation=Engineer&Id=12345

and instead of getting back a webpage or something I want to get back a json object so that I can parse on a different page.

The catch:

I can certainly accomplish this by calling a MVC controller with those parameters and returning a json object. However, Let’s say I need to create this json object inside a js file that takes those parameters’ values from the URL and I get my json back as the result.

The questions

Can I pass parameters to a js file and return a json object? Or
Can I call a js file from a controller and pass it these parameters to and retrieve a json object?
Do I even need to call a controller via a URL, or can I just call a js file giving it parameters from a URL and then returning the json?

What is the proper/best way of handling this scenario, with MVC, js, jquery…anything??

Thanks a lot guys!

Answer 1

Use jquery to parse the URL by inserting this into a <script> tag before creating the json object. from link from LekisS

$.extend({
  getUrlVars: function(){
    var vars = [], hash;
    var hashes = window.location.href.slice(window.location.href.indexOf('?') + 1).split('&');
    for(var i = 0; i < hashes.length; i++)
    {
      hash = hashes[i].split('=');
      vars.push(hash[0]);
      vars[hash[0]] = hash[1];
    }
    return vars;
  },
  getUrlVar: function(name){
    return $.getUrlVars()[name];
  }
});

// Get object of URL parameters
var allVars = $.getUrlVars();

// Getting URL var by its nam
var byName = $.getUrlVar('name');

In a separate script tag create your json object. You will need to include the Json2.js plugin to convert objects to JSON. So include this script also before the JSON object creation.

Once you have the appropriate scripts and variables you can create a json object using those parameters as needed by calling them as shown at the bottom of the example using jquery. You can also look up which JSON conversion (i.e, to string or object) you want from the Json2.js script file.

Now we have everything inside a bunch of scripts but where do we get json object through URL calling?

So the answer is simple:

Create a simple html page with these scripts where the last script finally creates and returns the json. Upload to server and use URL parameters like

www.mysite.com/getStuff?para1=value&para2=value2 to get the json object.