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Latest jQuery CDN with code tiggling.

Monday 28 February 2011

Improving Asp.net MVC maintainability and RESTful conformance

I've used Asp.net MVC for a few years now but this issue I've stumbled upon just a few days ago seems something everydayish and I wonder how come I've never bumped into it. It has to do with Asp.net MVC routing and action method selection. First of all think of default route definition that looks like this:

   1:  // default application route
   2:  routes.MapRoute(
   3:      "Default",
   4:      "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
   5:      new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
   6:  );
Mind that id route value is optional? Yes optional. So it should be perfectly feasible to have two action methods: one with the id parameter and one without it: public ActionResult Index() { ... } and public ActionResult Index(int id) { ... } But you've probably guessed it? This doesn't work out of the box. You'll get a runtime error stating that there are two matching action methods for the current request. A bit strange? I thought so as well. So let's try and accomplish just that!

Wednesday 2 February 2011

jQuery animated "scroll into view" plugin (with additional ":scrollable" selector filter)

Sometimes our pages have to deal with long(er) unpaged lists of data. Long enough to fall off the viewable browser window estate. Actually you don't even have to deal with lists at all. Let me re-define the problem: when you have a scrollable element on your page (may be the very body of it) and you need to programmatically scroll to its out-scrolled child element, then this jQuery plugin is just for you. Now let's see when we have to do this and what could go wrong.