Need an explanation to why this is

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am following the examples in the Agile Web Development with Rails book and there is one thing that I dont quite understand.

If you aren't familiar with the book a lot of it is geared towards making a shopping site. The point that I am at is tying in AJAX with the updating of the contents of the users shopping cart.

This is the peice of code within the store.rhtml file

2

chris wrote:

I am following the examples in the Agile Web Development with Rails book and there is one thing that I dont quite understand.

Now after going through the example and getting everything working I skimmed over it one more time and wondered if things would work if I never created the partial for the cart. So I substituted the code within the _cart.rhtml file into the "cart" div tag in the main rhtml file and it worked.

What I don't understand is what is happening in the rjs file. -- page[:cart].replace_html :partial => "cart", :object => @cart --

When I got everything working after making the changes I thought that I should be able to remove the :partial => cart section of the code above, since the code that previously existed within the partial file was moved to the store.rhtml file so there is no partial that is allowing the cart to be displayed. Now for some reason it is at this point that it blows up and throws the errors on to the screen.

The point of using AJAX here is that instead of refreshing the entire page when you add something to your cart, you can just update the part of the page that displays the shopping cart. The RJS line above is saying "find the div called 'cart' in the current page, and replace it with the contents of the partial template called 'cart'".

That's why you have the 'shopping cart' bit of RHTML in a separate file called _cart.rhtml. It's so that you can reference *just* that bit of HTML. If you lump the shopping cart HTML in with the overall page, how will you tell Rails which bit of RHTML you want to re-render?

It sounds like you were expecting 'replace_html' to look through your main RHTML file, and pull out the code that was originally rendered inside the 'cart' div, and re-render that. I'm afraid it's not that smart!

When you call 'replace_html', all it's doing is rendering some RHTML in the usual way, and then using Javascript in the browser to replace a specified part of the current page with the newly rendered RHTML. You could tell it to render a completely different partial template if you wanted, or you could tell it just to render some text. That's why you have to specify a partial template in this case -- if you didn't, it would have no way of knowing what you're expecting it to render.

Chris

3

Thanks for the reply. it makes sense I guess although I am not sure if it is that complex to replace the contents of a div tag with an id.

It is hard to tell how much information was being posted back from the server and whether more information was being posted back doing it the second way, although maybe if I watched the cmd window that the WEBrick server is running in it would answer that.

Thanks for the input :slight_smile: