RJS page.update question

rubyonrails-talk
1

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?

2

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

3

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