I thought this should be pretty well documented, because it seems like a pretty common scenario. Unfortunately, I find a lot of conflicting information out there and no real consensus on the correct way to go about this in an MVC 3 compatible, unobtrusive Ajax sort of way. I can certainly hack together something that "works", but i'd rather do it the way it's supposed to be done via the framework.
Here's what I need. I have Login link in the upper right corner of the site. The site allows both authenticated and unauthenticated users. So, I want to have a dynamic ajax popup when the user clicks the Login link.
This should go out to the controller, and pull back the HTML for the login dialog. It should then be displayed in a jquery ui popup dialog, and when the users enters their information it should redirect them to the "Dashboard" page (regardless of what page they are currently on). If they enter the wrong credentials, it should stay on the current page with the popup dialog still open and display validation errors ("username or password incorrect").
In other words, it has to tie into mvc 3 unobtrusive validation and use unobtrusive ajax, and display things in a jquery ui dialog.
This seems to be less trivial than I thought it would be. Any pointers to an example that does this? Anyone have a sample they can share?
UPDATE:
The conventional wisdom is, if you need to redirect, don't make it Ajax. However, in this case Ajax is required because I need to validate the creditials and post validation errors without causing a page refresh, or a redirect to a different login page. I need for the authentication to go through and post the errors in the popup dialog.
Seems like what you are looking for: http://evolpin.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/asp-net-mvc-partial-view-and-ajax-real-world-example/