render :update returning null

rubyonrails-talk
1

I wondered if anyone can help me, I am trying to add some basic ajax to my new project but I've run into a problem.

I have a RESTful ProductsController which uses pagination, I would like to basically re-render the index template on susbequent ajax calls to the index action. However the following doesn't work

format.js do   render (:update) do |page|     page.replace_html 'main', :template => 'index'   end end

The response I receive is

Element.update('main',null);

which has the effect of empty the contents of my 'main' div, which is not very helpful. It seems the following works, but its not what I need.

page.replace_html 'main', :partial => 'somepartial'

Any one have any ideas, do I just have the syntax wrong?

2

I think you're right :slight_smile: Unforunately I need to re-render the whole template (minus the layout) not just a partial. Without separating the content of my template into a partial for the sake of making this work (which feels very wrong) I can't see a way around it.

Any ideas?

Eduardo Yáñez Parareda wrote:

3

I think you're right :slight_smile: Unforunately I need to re-render the whole template (minus the layout) not just a partial. Without separating the content of my template into a partial for the sake of making this work (which feels very wrong) I can't see a way around it.

This is quite disgusting but: in your controller @content = render_to_string :template => 'foo' in your rjs file : page.replace_html 'main', @content

However you don't need to do this, eg

link_to_remote 'click me', :url => ..., :update => 'main'

Then in you action just do a bog standard render :template => ...

Fred

4

Indeed it is disgusting, but sometimes that's necessary to solve a problem :frowning: However I've managed to solve it, typically it was easier than I thought

format.js do   render :update do |page|     page.replace_html 'main', :file => 'products/index'   end end

Yay for the Rails source.