REST + AJAX (RJS)

rubyonrails-talk
1

I’ve read most of the Ruby/Rails books, but I’m struggling with this: How do you combine simple AJAX UI actions with RESTful controllers?

In my app, I want to keep all controllers REST-compliant. On a form, I want one select dropdown filter the options in another select. So I read several ajax ways I can do that. But they all seem to point to hitting an action on the controller, which would be outside of REST (the action wouldn’t be INDEX, NEW, CREATE, SHOW, EDIT, UPDATE, DESTROY). I see in the e-book RJS Templates for Rails how to build RJS-based site, but is an Ajaxed-out site just going to have controllers with more than 7 actions, or am I missing something?

-Ryan

2

I’m guessing you want an action that will return a list of items for the second dropdown? If so, you should be able to pass a query string to your index action to filter the results it returns.

eg. a GET to /controller/?month=september

would restrict the list that the index returns to only results in september. That seems pretty RESTful to me – it’s using appropriate HTTP methods to request a list of resources with some simple filtering based on the query string.

Your index.rjs can then work with that data.

James.