Calling ASP.NET MVC Action Methods from JavaScript

In a recent blog post, I wrote a a controller inspector to demonstrate Controller and Action Descriptors. In this blog post, I apply that knowledge to build something more useful. One pain point when you write Ajax heavy applications using ASP.NET MVC is managing the URLs that Routing generates on the server. These URLs aren't accessible from code in a static JavaScript file. There are techniques to mitigate this: Generate the URLs in the view and pass them into the JavaScript API. This approach has the drawback that it isn't unobtrusive and requires some script in the view. If you prefer the unobtrusive approach, embed the URLs in the HTML in a logical and semantic manner and the script can read them from the DOM. Both approaches get the job...(read more) ...