How to edit tabular data (ASP MVC)

Question

I need to be able to edit a table of data in the browser.

I have seen in MVCContrib there is a HTML helper to render out a table. Useful... but what about if I want the user to be able to edit that table? From what I can see it does not help there.

What is the best way to approach this?

Traditional FORM with a TABLE inside? If so is MVC smart enough to parse the posted data back into a collection of rows? How would that work anyway?

Or perhaps it should just switch to edit mode when a row is clicked (using javascript etc) then when user moves to a different row an AJAX action is called to submit just the one row. I can imagine the logic could get complex here - this would presumably still use a form but would I have to insert it into the DOM dynamically?

I also need to be able to add rows to this table. I do not require paging support.

Is there an off the shelf solution out there?

Should I go back to web forms? :)

Answer 1

Take a look at Phil Haack's blog where he describes how to model bind to a list.

Maybe this can help?