Been doing some JavaScript apps recently in Rails and decided to push RJS as far as I could.
Along the way I found some things that are pretty nice to have on the client side to avoid having to code all your JavaScript in strings.
Using update_page
<%= link_to_function 'Yes' do |page|
page[:one].hide
page[:two].show
end %>
Putting that in your views Generates the following JavaScript
<a href="#" onclick="$('one').hide();$('two').show();; return false;">Yes</a>
That page object that’s yield‘d to by #link_to_function is a
JavaScriptGenerator object. The same kind you get when you do stuff like this
on the serverside
def search
respond_to do |wants|
@users = User.search params[:q]
wants.js
end
end
In search.rjs:
page.update_html :results, render(:partial => 'user', :collection => @users)
There’s also #update_page_tag. This method also yield’s a
JavaScriptGenerator object to the given block and then wraps the generated
JavaScript in some 'script’ tags.
<%= update_page_tag do |page|
page[:one].show
page[:two].hide
end %>
Generates the following JavaScript
<script type="text/javascript">
$('one').show();
$('two').hide();
</script>
One thing it doesn’t yet support but would be great if it did in Rails 2.0 is registering event handlers.
<%= update_page_tag do |page|
page[:one].on_click do
page[:two].show
end
end %>
It would be really nice if that generated
<script type="text/javascript">
Event.observe('one', 'click', function () {
$('two').show();
});
</script>
Most of my existing client side JavaScript consists of registering event handlers, so I still have some JavaScript code in my views consisting of Ruby strings. With something like this, we could be close to eliminating JavaScript entirely; the same way Rails’ migrations have done with SQL.
