How to deal with many possible values to make a query?

Question

I\'m building an MVC app in which the user will have the possibilities of using a lot of filters to get exactly what he wants.

Here\'s an overview of those filters based

Answer 1

Here's a way you could handle your problem.

First, create a ViewModel with your search parameters.

public class FilterViewModel
{
    public string ObjName { get; set; }
    public string ObjType { get; set; }
    public string OtherType { get; set; }
}

In your controller, pass this to the view.

public virtual ActionResult SearchResults()
{
    return View(new FilterViewModel());
}

In your SearchResults.cshtml you need to encode the model to a json and then use an ajax call to filter your results. Assumming there's a button with btnFilterResults id. This is going to load the results from a partial view (that should be your table) using ajax.

Finally, in your controller you can get the results:

[HttpGet]
public virtual ActionResult LoadTableReporteGeneral(string viewModel)
{
    var filterOptions = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(viewModel);
    var query = from t in db.YourTableName
                select t;
     //This returns an IQueryable with all of your data, no filtering yet.

     //Start filtering.
     if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(filterOptions.ObjName))
     {
         query = query.Where(x => x.ObjName == filterOptions.ObjName);
     }  
     if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(filterOptions.ObjType ))
     {
         query = query.Where(x => x.ObjType == filterOptions.ObjType );
     }  
     //and so on. 
     //Finally return a partial view with your table. 
     return PartialView(MVC.Shared.Views._YourTableName, query);
}

Note: I'm using T4MVC and Json.Net packages.

Hope this helps.