How does page.update actually work? I know its a wrapper for Prototype.update but how does it get the partial in there?
Say I wanted to update a div with the contents of a partial manually like this.
content = render(:partial => 'whatever') page.call "$('my_div').update(#{content})"
But his does not work. It keeps giving me weird errors about tags. Any clues?
That's now how you are supposed to use page.call. The first argument is supposed to be the function to call (ie $('my_div').update) and subsequent arguments are arguments to pass through. What your code does is ask the browser to execute
$('my_div').update(<span>some html here</span>) (assuming that was the html content), ie the string literal is not quoted and is just dumped in there. There is no need to use page.call here though as page.replace_html handles this already (see http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/PrototypeHelper/JavaScriptGenerator/GeneratorMethods.html#M001446 )
Fred
I am aware of page.update and page.replace_html but I was wondering how it actually works.
Basically I have a callback from a scriptaculous effect that will update a div with the results of some partial so I can not use the built in page.xxx calls.
Your first post rather implied that you could since you were using page.call. Anyway, first off you can use update_page to get an rjs like page object anywhere you happen to be. Secondly prototype's update stuff is as simple as $('some_div').update('hello world'). If however you are generating the html in rails and then just injecting it into some javascript with #{} then you need to quote the string of html properly (and if you quote the string with " you need to escape any " in the html (and similarly with '). page.call does all that for you, there's a helper whose name I forget that does that and to_json would probably do the trick too.
Fred