Question

What, if any, is the accepted way of adding a key-value pair from ASP.NET/JavaScript code to a C# dictionary? TIA.

Answer 1

How I’ve handled this requirement is to get all the data in a name value pair in javascript, then post this to the server via ajax …

e.g.
loc is your page,
methodName being the WebMethod in code behind page,
arguments you can populate as

var arguments = '"data":"name1=value1&name2=value2"';

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: loc + "/" + methodName,
    data: "{" + arguments + "}",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "json",
    success: onSuccess,
    fail: onFail
});

On your code behind, create a web method
e.g

[System.Web.Services.WebMethod(EnableSession = true)]
public static string ItemsForDictionary(string data)
{
    Dictionary<String, String> newDict = ConvertDataToDictionary(data);
}

I use a generic method to convert this data parameter in codebehind to a Dictionary.

private static System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<String, String> ConvertDataToDictionary(string data)
    {

        char amp = '&';
        string[] nameValuePairs = data.Split(amp);

        System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<String, String> dict = new System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<string, string>();

        char eq = '=';

        for (int x = 0; x < nameValuePairs.Length; x++)
        {
            string[] tmp = nameValuePairs[x].Split(eq);
            dict.Add(tmp[0], HttpUtility.UrlDecode(tmp[1]));

        }

        return dict;
    }

Anyways .. hope this gives you the idea …