19.1. Using MVC Unobtrusive Ajax

The MVC Framework contains support for unobtrusive Ajax. This is similar to the unobtrusive client-side validation covered in Chapter 18, in that it doesn't involve inserting extra blocks of JavaScript code at arbitrary points in your HTML document. Like the client-side validation support, MVC unobtrusive Ajax is based on the jQuery JavaScript library, which we provide an introduction to in Chapter 20.

19.1.1. Creating the Project

To demonstrate the unobtrusive Ajax feature, we are going to create a project to which we can add asynchronous features as we go. We have created a new Visual Studio project using the Empty option for the ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application template; we called the project MvcApp. We created a single model class called Appointment, which you can see in Listing 19-1.