I am getting confused about the relationship between respond_to/format.js and an xhr request. Would appreciate any advice, tips on how this has changed in different Rails versions if it has, etc.
In particular, I am confused as to why an xhr request sometimes will trigger format.js, even though it's not actually a request to format=>js, but other times won't. And if I want to take some special action in response to xhr requests, is it best practice to check request.xhr?, or to use format.js?
I am adding some unobtrusive JQuery JS of my own (not using the Rails helpers), which submit to the same controller actions as the ordinary HTML actions. But when a request is received from an xhr, the controller should do something different -- for instance, not do a redirect, or return just a partial instead of the full HTML (the JQuery will grab the partial and insert it into the page itself).
What is the best practice for having a controller action recognize an xhr request, and respond differently? In some sample code on the net, I see "format.js". Which confuses me a bit, because the JS code isn't actually making a .js request, it's still requesting .html -- but sometimes format.js seems to match it _anyway_, and I don't know why. Other times it does not. I can not predict it.
Or, I can actually manually test for "if request.xhr" and just "render" what I want manually if so, if not do the whole respond_to thing. But that gets a bit odd too.
Are there best practices for this stuff? For having a controller action that responds differently to an xhr request from JS than to an ordinary browser HTML request? When I google around, people seem all over the place on this, it seems to have changed a lot in different rails versions, etc.
Any advice appreciated.