First off I'm making the assumption that your $.ajax is for JQuery and not some other Javascript framework. Please correct me if that's wrong.
ASP.NET MVC can actually do what you are asking it to (resolve data sent via AJAX to a List, but it seems to have a difficult time doing it via a GET request. It would help to know which version of ASP.NET MVC you are using, as more is required to get this working on the older versions. However, what I'm suggesting should work on MVC 3 or 4.
When you send AJAX via JQuery using a GET request and passing it a JavaScript array, this is what you are sending to the server:
http://localhost:50195/FilterSessions/GetFilterSession?undefined=&undefined=
It's no wonder the model is null because no data is actually being sent.
I believe ASP.NET can accept objects (and even arrays of objects) like this, but it won't do so with it formatted as JSON (like via JSON.stringify) as that just results in the following request:
http://localhost:50195/FilterSessions/GetFilterSession?[{%22Path%22:%22Test%22,%22Name%22:%22TestName%22,%22Value%22:%22Testing%22},{%22Path%22:%22Test%22,%22Name%22:%22TestName%22,%22Value%22:%22Testing%22}]
The way you probably want to do this is with a POST request. ASP.NET MVC will actually accept a JSON string as POST data and will decode it and resolve the model properly. Your AJAX code works fine with a couple modifications:
$.ajax({
url: "/FilterSessions/GetFilterSession",
type: "POST", //Changed to POST
dataType: "json",
data: JSON.stringify(jsonFilters), //Pack data in a JSON package.
contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", //Added so ASP recognized JSON
traditional: true,
success: function (response) {
alert('Success!');
}
});
The controller you posted should recognize POST data already, but in case it doesn't, a simple [HttpPost] attribute is all you need:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult GetFilterSession(List jsonFilters)
{
//Do things
return Json(false, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}