how to make a wizard with ASP.Net MVC

c# .net asp.net-mvc wizard
Joe picture Joe · Nov 17, 2008 · Viewed 29.9k times · Source

Our site has multiple "wizards" where various data is collected over several pages, and cannot be committed to the database until the last step.

What is the best/correct way to make a wizard like this with ASP.Net MVC

edit: My boss is now saying "no javascript" - any thoughts on how to get around that restriction?

Answer

user1228 picture user1228 · Nov 17, 2008

I don't believe there is a best/correct way, but the way I'd do it is...

Each wizard gets its own page. Each step gets its own div. All steps are in the same form.

The previous/next buttons would essentially hide/show the div in each step of the process. The last step's submit button submits the entire form. It would be pretty trivial to implement this using jQuery, and it would be easy to maintain as all the wizard steps are in a single ViewPage.

On the controller side, you'd have two controller methods, the HttpVerbs.Get version that would prepare the form for viewing and the HttpVerbs.Post version that would take a FormsResult and parse it to get out the information required to submit the user's answers to storage/other processes.

Wow, your boss stinks.

This answer almost gracefully works for those ****** who have javascript disabled (yes, both of them). You can tweak it to hide the next-previous buttons via CSS and unhide them in your javascript code. This way people with javascript see the wizard and people without javascript will see the entire form (without next/prev buttons).

The other option is to create a view for each step in the wizard. You can store the intermediate results of the form in the Session. This way would cost plenty of time and effort to implement, which means you could probably squeeze some overtime out of your boss when you demonstrate, in about twenty minutes of effort you spend during lunch, how easy the javascript route is to implement.

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