Ajax should do it, right?
Do one of the ajax calls posting that variable back
Do you have links with examples?
Is therre another way to do that? I would like to do that inside a rails call.
Thanks René
Javascript is client-side, ruby/rails is server side. The only way for the 2 to exchange values or anything else for that matter, is by sending requests to and replying back, either by ajax or a normal request. you cant run javascript in the view before it's sent to the browser, as well as you cant run ruby in the browser, only on the server side.
Thorsten,
Thaks for response,
I understand. But I am sending a view to browser from server with a javascript. This javascript will have some actions interacting with the user and than when user send a new request to control I would like to send with a string processed throw javascript.
The problem is that I don’t kwon how to put string returned from a javascript call function inside an Form_tag. I would like something like it:
<% form_tag :action => ‘create’, :mystring => foo.bar() do %> <%= submit_tag “Create” %> <% end %>
foo is my javascript object.
Thanks again!
Rene
I think the simplest way to do something like this is to create a hidden field in the form and have your javascript function put its value into that field so it gets passed as part of the request. If your function needs to be run just as the form is submitted, you can hook it into the onsubmit event.
Could you give me an example?
1. To write to a form field using javascript in the page use:
document.repair_form.repair_customer_id.value= 45
where in my case: repair_form is the name of the form and customer_id is the name of the field.
2. Another way to update the server with a js value is to pass it via a call to remote. ie. create a new ajax call passing in the js variable you want to send. eg.
<script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ function update_customer(customer_id) { new Ajax.Request('/repair/change_customer/'+customer_id, {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true}) }
var external_update_customer = this.update_customer //]]> </script>
now I can call this from js code and the value I pass can be obtained from the params[:id] on the server side. ie. update_customer(67) will cause an asynchronous call to change_customer method in repair controller with params[:id] of 67.
I prefer doing it this way and then updating the page fields from the server render :update response. You can do server side checking that way and update other things like error prompts etc.
Incidentally to directly update the field from the server response you can do: render :update do |page| page<<"document.repair_form.repair_customer_id.value= #{@customer.id}" end
Also, in the js snippet, I have included - var external_update_customer = this.update_customer. This allows me to call this function from a popup window. using the js opener method. So a popup window can now communicate a value back to the server via the parent window. Useful to do popup look-ups.
Finally, the js SCRIPT was added to the page directly. I am currently playing with different ways of doing these sort of updates, but if I decide to use this approach, it would make sense to build a rails helper to create the js updater function.
hth tonypm
