i cant honestly think of an example of needing that...

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Can you elaborate a bit on how to best tackle this kind of scenario with ASP.Net MVC? Where does this kind of code belong?

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Hi,

I may be mistaken but I think the idea is to support RJS style results as per ruby on rails.

In RJS you have a page helper class that actually produces the javascript, with methods to show/hide.flash etc.

Ultimately you are right in that a degree of coupling is produced, e.g. if you write code like Page.Flash('div1') your controller is at the very least aware of your html ids.

However for simple scenarios it can be worth the tradeoff, as long as you understand you are making a tradeoff that is :-)

Kind regards,

Paul

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Does this actually update the contents of 'some-div'?  All I am seeing is a black page with the text "$('#some-div').htm('Updated!');"

It simply returns JavaScript to be executed on the client side.  The point is that, IMO, JavaScript shouldn't be put together and returned to the view from the controller since it is a presentation concer.

Bill, could you tell us how best to tackle the approach and substitute the function code you presented with a more maintainable/legitimate example where seperation of concerns are withheld?

Having this ActionResult is very useful if you happen to be building an action method that is the endpoint for a JSONP call.

For example:

[HttpGet]

public ActionResult JSONP(string callback)

{

 object data = new { FirstName = "Jon", LastName="Doe" };

 JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();

 JavaScriptResult result = new JavaScriptResult();

 result.Script = callback + "(" + serializer.Serialize(data) + ");";

 return result;

}

Well there are occasions that this is needed, in my case I had to use it with my third party html editor - TinyMce. http://www.tinymce.com/#

TinyMCE object has an option to set its property external_image_list_url, see below:

tinyMCE.init({

       ...

       external_image_list_url : "myexternallist.js"

});

this is expecting a link to a physical javascript file. Since I have to retrieve my dynamic data at the server,

I had to build my js script on the fly and return the response as a javascript  file. See response header Content-Type below after returning a Javascript() result.

Server                               ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0

Date                               Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:45:50 GMT

X-AspNet-Version       4.0.30319

X-AspNetMvc-Version 3.0

Cache-Control                private

Content-Type                application/x-javascript; charset=utf-8

Content-Length                186

Connection                       Close

If I was the one who made tinyMCE, I would set the external_image_list_url to expect a list in JSON format. However I'm not the one who made tinyMCE and I don't have the luxury of time to create such a powerful tool myself, so I had to work around it and make use of  the Javascript result feature in MVC.

my two cents. :)

If you're wondering where this kind of response would be applicable, it might help to try Ruby on Rails. It would also give you insight into the future releases of ASP.NET's implementation of MVC because that's where Microsoft draws all of its inspiration for MVC.NET. Imitation is the highest form of flattery!