How can I post an array of string to ASP.NET MVC Controller without a form?

Question

I am creating a small app to teach myself ASP.NET MVC and JQuery, and one of the pages is a list of items in which some can be selected. Then I would like to press a button and send a List (or something equivalent) to my controller containing the ids of the items that were selected, using JQuery's Post function.

I managed to get an array with the ids of the elements that were selected, and now I want to post that. One way I could do this is to have a dummy form in my page, with a hidden value, and then set the hidden value with the selected items, and post that form; this looks crufty, though.

Is there a cleaner way to achieve this, by sending the array directly to the controller? I've tried a few different things but it looks like the controller can't map the data it's receiving. Here's the code so far:

function generateList(selectedValues) {
   var s = {
      values: selectedValues //selectedValues is an array of string
   };
   $.post("/Home/GenerateList", $.toJSON(s), function() { alert("back") }, "json");
}

And then my Controller looks like this

public ActionResult GenerateList(List<string> values)
{
    //do something
}

All I managed to get is a "null" in the controller parameter...

Any tips?

Answer 1

I modified my response to include the code for a test app I did.

Update: I have updated the jQuery to set the 'traditional' setting to true so this will work again (per @DustinDavis' answer).

First the javascript:

function test()
{
    var stringArray = new Array();
    stringArray[0] = "item1";
    stringArray[1] = "item2";
    stringArray[2] = "item3";
    var postData = { values: stringArray };

    $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "/Home/SaveList",
        data: postData,
        success: function(data){
            alert(data.Result);
        },
        dataType: "json",
        traditional: true
    });
}

And here's the code in my controller class:

public JsonResult SaveList(List<String> values)
{
    return Json(new { Result = String.Format("Fist item in list: '{0}'", values[0]) });
}

When I call that javascript function, I get an alert saying "First item in list: 'item1'". Hope this helps!