getting started with jQuery rails 3.2

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm trying to work out how to get started using some jQuery in my rails app.

rails -v = 3.2.2 ruby -v = 1.9.3-p194

I'm only sporadically a web-developer, and still quite inexperienced with jQuery especially, so I may be making an obvious mistake.

Essentially, I've done very little after creating a new app, I've learnt that jQuery is included by default with the gem 'jquery-rails', '2.0.0'.

In my application.js (app/assets/javascripts) I've added the line //= require jquery-ui

I now want to have a datepicker in one of my forms, looking at the jQueryUI website (Datepicker | jQuery UI) I can see that the class of the text-field has to be "hasDatepicker", and the id "datepicker"

I've done this in my view like this

<%= f.text_field :game_start_time, :class => :hasDatepicker, :id => :datepicker %>

and also to test like this

<input type= "text" class="hasDatepicker" id="datepicker">

however when I click on the text-field nothing happens, no date picker appears.

Is there some massively obvious step I'm missing here?

I've looked in the developer tools at the 'scripts' part, and found that jQuery-ui seems to be loading with the page, I can even search and find the datepicker fucntion there.

Is there some function I need to add in to say when the user clicks on this text field, - show the date picker?

Thanks in advance

2

You don't need to set the class - jquery-ui does that itself when it sets up the date picker. You do however need to tell it that you want a date picker by calling

    $('#datepicker').datepicker()

This tell query "I want a date picker, and make one from the DOM element with id datepicker"

Typically you do something like

$(function(){     $('#datepicker').datepicker() })

in your javascript, which ensures that this only happens once the DOM is setup properly. If you've decided to follow the defaults and use coffee script then this would be

$->   $('#datepicker').datepicker()

Fred