Question

I am creating a website with a rather lengthy medical questionnaire. The users/patients need to be able to hover or click on a medical term and see the definition.

What are ways to accomplish this in RoR? There are similar plugins for WordPress, but I haven’t found any in Rails.

My idea is have a Term model, that has attributes “word” and a “definition”. Then in my layouts, I have to somehow scan the page and output the definition.

Answer 1

There are multiple approaches. I use jquery-tooltip. I’m in the same boat, instead of medical forms in my case it’s insurance forms.

I checked out a few different approaches. I really like the tooltip feature coming soon to jquery-ui 1.9. Until it’s officially released, I’m using jquery-tooltip.

They both work the same, give an element a title:

<div id='q12', title='This is number 12'>
   What is this?
</div>

Then

$('#q12').tooltip

If the only reason you ever give your elements a Title is to create a tooltip, then you can just use something like:

    $("[title]").tooltip({ position: "center left", predelay:500 });

Then every element with a title defined will show your stylized tooltip when the element is hovered over.