How can I post an array of string to ASP.NET MVC Controller without a form?

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I am creating a small app to teach myself ASP.NET MVC and JQuery, and one of the pages is a list of items in which some can be selected. Then I would like to press a button and send a List (or something equivalent) to my controller containing the ids of the items that were selected, using JQuery’s Post function.

I managed to get an array with the ids of the elements that were selected, and now I want to post that. One way I could do this is to have a dummy form in my page, with a hidden value, and then set the hidden value with the selected items, and post that form; this looks crufty, though.

Is there a cleaner way to achieve this, by sending the array directly to the controller? I’ve tried a few different things but it looks like the controller can’t map the data it’s receiving. Here’s the code so far:

function generateList(selectedValues) {
   var s = {
      values: selectedValues //selectedValues is an array of string
   };
   $.post("/Home/GenerateList", $.toJSON(s), function() { alert("back") }, "json");
}

And then my Controller looks like this

public ActionResult GenerateList(List<string> values)
{
    //do something
}

All I managed to get is a “null” in the controller parameter…

Any tips?

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