I'm having an issue with the design of my views that I can't seem to wrap my head around. I have a page where I am showing a collection of objects in a list. The way that I designed it, it looked something like this:
main view:
<h2>here is the list</h2> <ul> <%= render(:partial => "items/item", :collection => @items %> </ul>
collection item's view:
<li id="<%= dom_id(item) %>"> ... INFO ABOUT item.... </li>
This works great, creating a <ul> that is full of <li>'s. I hit a snag when I start trying to update individual <li> items with ajax calls. The :update option for link_to_remote() and related functions doesn't give me an option to replace the dom element that it refers to as far as I can tell. It lets me specify a dom id that I can change the innerHTML of, insert the returned html with in it at the beginning or the end, before or after the element, but it doesn't seem to allow me to REPLACE the element.
So a call like this:
remote_function(:url => credential_search_instance_path (credential_search_instance), :method => :put, :update => dom_id(item) )
Will replace the html inside of the <li> element, so it would update the page to look like this:
<li id="item_1"> <li id="item_1"> ... INFO ABOUT item.... </li> </li>
I ended up getting around the issue by checking if it is an xhr request in my item view like this; <% if ! request.xhr? then %> <li id="<%= dom_id(item) %>"> <% end %> ... INFO ABOUT item.... <% if ! request.xhr? then %> </li> <% end %>
That solution works, but it seems very inelegant and adds a lot of noise to the view. Is it really true that I can't replace the dom element? Am I missing something? Is there a better way to design my view and partial?
Thanks, Jonathan
