JS int array to MVC3 controller

Question

I've got an array of strings in JS. All the members are actually numbers.
My controller has an int[] parameter.

I send it from jquery:

$.ajax({url: someUrl, data: {ids : JSON.stringify(id_array) }, ...)

and I receive it using

public ActionResult MyAction(int[] ids) { ...

The parameter doesn't get filled, I've checked, the Request.Form["ids"] contains "[\"25\",\"26\"]", the string represention of the JSON array. Is there any way to do this automatically without a lot of int parsing?

Answer 1

Have you tried not stringifying the array and letting mvc's default model binding do the magic

$.ajax({url: someUrl, data: {ids : id_array }, ...)

I'm pretty sure .net MVC will see the array and see it is an array of ints and map it to your array of ints correctly

Answer 2

For MVC3 you need to configure jQuery to use traditional, "shallow" serialisation.. See here.

Client-side AJAX request:

jQuery.ajaxSettings.traditional = true; //enable "shallow" serialisation globally
$.get("someUrl", {ids : id_array });

Action Method:

public ActionResult MyAction(string[] ids) { ... }

Answer 3

You can do this in two different ways

1. Use $.ajax to post data to your action

$.ajax({
    url: '/myController/myAction',
    dataType: 'json',
    type: 'POST',
    contentType: 'application/json; charset=utf-8',
    traditional: true,
    data: $.toJSON(json),
    success: function (data, textStatus, jqXHR) {
    ...
    }
});

Your action should look like this one

public class myController
{
    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult myAction(List<int> json)
    {
        ....
    }
}

2. Use $.post to post your data

$.post(
    '/myController/myAction',
    { json: $.toJSON(products) },
    function (data) {
    ...
});

In your action you should deserialize JSON string

public class myController
    {
    public ActionResult myAction(string json)
    {
        JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
        List<int> list = serializer.Deserialize<List<int>>(json);
    }
}

You need to download and include jquery.json-2.2.min.js to your code.

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-json/downloads/detail?name=jquery.json-2.2.min.js