I have a view where I want to perform different actions on the items in each row in a table, similar to this (in, say, ~/Views/Thing/Manage.aspx):

<table>
  <% foreach (thing in Model) { %>
    <tr>
      <td><%: thing.x %></td>
      <td>
        <% using (Html.BeginForm("SetEnabled", "Thing")) { %> 
          <%: Html.Hidden("x", thing.x) %>
          <%: Html.Hidden("enable", !thing.Enabled) %>
          <input type="submit"  
                 value="<%: thing.Enabled ? "Disable" : "Enable" %>" />
        <% } %>
      </td>    
      <!-- more tds with similar action forms here, a few per table row -->     
   </tr>
  <% } %>

In my ThingController, I have functions similar to the following:

public ActionResult Manage() {
  return View(ThingService.GetThings());
}

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult SetEnabled(string x, bool enable) {
  try {
    ThingService.SetEnabled(x, enable);
  } catch (Exception ex) {
    ModelState.AddModelError("", ex.Message); // I know this is wrong...
  }
  return RedirectToAction("Manage");
}

In the most part, this is working fine. The problem is that if ThingService.SetEnabled throws an error, I want to be able to display the error at the top of the table. I've tried a few things with Html.ValidationSummary() in the page but I can't get it to work.

Note that I don't want to send the user to a separate page to do this, and I'm trying to do it without using any javascript.

Am I going about displaying my table in the best way? How do I get the errors displayed in the way I want them to? I will end up with perhaps 40 small forms on the page. This approach comes largely from this article, but it doesn't handle the errors in the way I need to.

Any takers?