ASP.NET MVC: search in data entry form

Question

and thanks for reading.

I am building a data entry form. I am trying to figure out a way to let the user to provide a criteria (last name for instance), search the emplo

Answer 1

Something like this in the controller to search in the database (using linq) ?

public ActionResult searchEmployees(string searchString) {
        var employees = (from e in db.Employees
                               where e.Name.Contains(searchString)
                               orderby e.Name
                               select e);
        return view("SearchResult", employees);
}

EDIT: Just read your comments and if I understand correctly, you're only interested in the id's. Are you using those in javascript, and is this some kind of ajax call ? In that case you might want to return an array, or a csv string and deal with the id's in the javascript call.