ASP.NET MVC rendering partial view with jQuery ajax

Question

I have a controller action which renders a partial view:

public ActionResult Details(int id)
{
    DetailsViewModel model = 
        ModelBuilder.GetDetailsV         


        

Answer 1

All load does is return HTML from a server, so why not just append to a temporary div and then get the HTML from it on success?

var $dummy = $("
");
$dummy.load("MyController/Details", function(response, status, xhr) {
    var $container = appendContainer();
    if (status != "success") {
        $container.html('an error has occured');
    }
    else
    {
        $container.html($dummy.html());
    }
    $dummy.remove();
});

UPDATE:

If you're expecting an exception then you should handle it. If you're basically allowing the error to occur just to get status != "success" then that's a serious code smell. You should catch the error and return a different PartialView.

public ActionResult Details(int id)
{
    try
    {
        DetailsViewModel model = 
            ModelBuilder.GetDetailsViewModel(id, _repository);
        return PartialView("Details", model);
    }
    catch (SomeException ex)
    {
        return PartialView("Error", ex.Message);
    }
}

Then you're guaranteed to always get a valid HTML response and if you don't, then your basic error an error occured will come into play.