Question

Context :

I’m trying to create a pie chart using jqPlot, gathering data from a Rails database.

My problem occurs because jqplot doesn’t understand the strings generated from event.name. If I manually insert a couple of strings, without going through Rails, it works fine.nI believe it has something to do with escaping characters it shouldn’t be.

The error I get from Firebug shows events = [["Title", 1234566]]. Thus jqplot tries to create this chart with "Title" as a key. It doesn’t like that.

I’ve tried using html_safe, to no avail.

---

Code :

<% things = [] %>
  <% @topEvents.each do |event| %>
<% things << [event.name, event.total] %>
<% end %>

$.jqplot('topEvents', [ <%= things %> ], {
    seriesDefaults : {
        renderer : jQuery.jqplot.PieRenderer,
        rendererOptions : {
            showDataLabels: true
        }
    }
});

---

Environment :

• Ruby 1.9.3
• Rails 3.2.6
• SQLite3 3.6.20
• jquery-rails 2.0.2 (RubyGem)
• JQuery 1.7.2
• jqplot 1.0.0_r1012.

Answer 1

For future googlers…

Although "string" and 'string' may be equivalent once they are declared in Ruby, this fact is irrelevant when it comes to javascript. Within a <script> tag, ruby strings will show up as being double quoted. If you want single quotes, you’re going to have to import the string as something other than a string, and then manually add the quotes later.

Javascript will understand '<%= event.total %>' just fine. It will use Rails to print out the total, and then the script will append single quotes to either side.

Hope this helps anyone!