Modal Search and Select Item Dialog for ASP.NET

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Introduction

I’m a long time C# developer and for our company internal system, I need to develop a web application. Of course, ASP.NET was the choice. I’m used to Windows Forms/Desktop applications and I miss a lot of features in web development.

The one feature I missed the most was the reusable modal dialog with search and select item option. I use it for customer, country or storage item selection (for invoices). Also, I required to use it without page refresh, that’s why Ajax and JavaScript is used.

Just one note – I’m not a web developer, I know probably something could be done easier/faster in the example. But it works ?? …

Using the Code

You need to perform the following steps to use the dialog.

Add jqueryui into _Layout.cshtml.

@Styles.Render("~/Content/themes/base/css")
@Styles.Render("~/Content/themes/base/jquery.ui.all.css")
@Styles.Render("~/Content/themes/base/jquery.ui.dialog.css")

Also, you need to add jQuery CSS into layout, otherwise the dialog will not be displayed correctly (transparent, big, ...).

@Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jquery")
@Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jqueryui")
@RenderSection("scripts", required: false)

Insert the js file(s) at the bottom of your razor view.

@section Scripts {
 <script type="text/javascript" src="@Url.Content("/Scripts/App/searchSelectionDialog.js")"></script>
 <script type="text/javascript" src="@Url.Content("/Scripts/App/index.js")"></script>
}

Insert “hidden” dialog div into your razor view. Notice the parameters of the dialog – data-search-url sets the function to call to search items and data-select-func sets the JavaScript function to be called after the user selects some item. To populate the dialog, I use bTest button.

<div id="testDlg" title="Demo Items"

  data-search-url="@Url.Action("SearchJSON", 

  "Home")" 

  data-select-func="itemSelected">Please wait</div>
<button id="bTest" 

class="btn btn-default">Let's select some item!</button>

Now you can initialize the dialog in JavaScript. I use separate js file (in my Visual Studio 2013, I was not able to debug JavaScript code within the razor view). There is also click handler for the bTest button.

$(document).ready(function () {
 initSearchSelectionDialog($('#testDlg'));
 $("#bTest").click(function () {
  $("#testDlg").dialog("open");
 });
});

Once the user populates the dialog, C# code is called using Ajax from your home controller. I didn’t want to put database into the demo program, so you can easily compile and test it. That’s why I created a sample list of items directly in this function.

public JsonResult SearchJSON(string searchString)
{
 //create demo items
 var itemList = CreateDemoItems();

 var searchList = itemList;
 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(searchString))
 {
  searchList = itemList.FindAll(
   x => x.Name.ToUpper().Contains(searchString.ToUpper())).ToList();
 }

 //here you must convert your item attributes to Id, Name and Note
 //accepted by search dialog
 List<object> jsonList = new List<object>();
 foreach (var item in searchList)
 {
  jsonList.Add(new
  {
   Name = item.Name,
   Id = item.Id,
   Note = item.Note,
  });
 }

 return this.Json(jsonList, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

Points of Interest

To improve the code, you could add some paging option in the dialog and also probably it would be better to send only one page through Ajax/JSON call. But I don’t need that for my project.

History

• 21^st April, 2017: First version