novolocus.com » 2005 » December » 13 http://www.novolocus.com Whatever Andy Burns is working on... Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:00:31 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en Impressed with Rails - again http://www.novolocus.com/2005/12/13/impressed-with-rails-again/ http://www.novolocus.com/2005/12/13/impressed-with-rails-again/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:12:13 +0000 Andy http://www.novolocus.com/?p=213 So, I had need of a little ‘Ajax’. I wanted to provide a brief preview of some content, but without all the nastiness of page refreshes - an ideal candidate for XMLHTTPRequest. So I wrote my own. That was a mistake.

I’m comfortable with Javascript - I think I’m fairly accomplished with it - so I got it done, and it worked. It was only then that I thought ‘I think Rails does Ajax too’. Does it ever! Ten minutes, and I had a Rails Ajax version working (a lot less than my own time, even with my boiler-plate code) and, and this is the best bit, much more readable code! That’s what I call a win. link_to_remote was the useful function in question, and my call is:
link_to_remote( "Show",
:url => { :action => "show_small", :id => game.id },
:update => "js_board",
:before => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.left = get_x(this);
document.getElementById('js_board').style.top = get_y(this)",
:complete => "document.getElementById('js_board').style.visibility = 'visible'" )

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