MVC Paging and Sorting Patterns: How to Page or Sort Re-Using Form Criteria
- by CRice
What is the best ASP.NET MVC pattern for paging data when the data is filtered by form criteria?
This question is similar to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1425000/preserve-data-in-net-mvc but surely there is a better answer?
Currently, when I click the search button this action is called:
[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Search(MemberSearchForm formSp, int? pageIndex, string sortExpression)
{}
That is perfect for the initial display of the results in the table.
But I want to have page number links or sort expression links re-post the current form data (the user entered it the first time - persisted because it is returned as viewdata), along with extra route params 'pageIndex' or 'sortExpression',
Can an ActionLink or RouteLink (which I would use for page numbers) post the form to the url they specify?
<%= Html.RouteLink("page 2", "MemberSearch", new { pageIndex = 1 })%>
At the moment they just do a basic redirect and do not post the form values so the search page loads fresh.
In regular old web forms I used to persist the search params (MemberSearchForm) in the ViewState and have a GridView paging or sorting event reuse it.
