ASP.NET MVC: Basic form question

A friend has asked me to help him with a project that's MVC. This is my first experience with MVC. I'm trying to build the MVC components for a form for him.

A page has a modal popup which uses a JavaScript to POST or GET and receive HTML back—that it displays inside the popup modal.

I need to create an MVC form that has validation to display inside aforementioned popup. This popped-up form will be used elsewhere on the site, so needs to be modular.

Should I create an ActionResult in my Route's Controller that returns an View (.aspx) containing my form? Should I instead create a Partial View (.ascx) that has the form, then use that Partial View in a View for my Route so other parts of the site--other Routes--can do the same?

I'm stuck at that basic understanding. From there, I don't even know what to do about the validation (was told the same validation will be used on a nearly identical form) and how a ViewModel fits into this like is used elsewhere on the site.

I've been reading a lot and looking at a lot of examples but I'开发者_运维知识库m still confused.

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You've got two separate questions here really. To deal with whether you should use a partial view or a regular view, just think of it this way. Does the HTML content in question represent a full page, or just a piece of a page that will be reused inside of other pages?

If it's the former, then use a full View. If it's the latter, then put it in a partial view. It sounds to me like you just need a full View. In either case, it's easy to change to the other if it turns out it's not meeting your needs.

As to validation, take a look at xVal if you're using ASP.Net MVC 1. It allows for easy validation using attributes on your models.

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When you make your post from the modal popup do the validation then in the actionmethod you created specifically for that popup. If you want client side validation write up the js to do it.

As for the modal markup and what not just create a partial view for that, shouldn't be a big deal.