Question

I am learning Ruby on Rails, and I am very confused on how the controller-model-view relationship works for my application.

What I have now is a table full of comments (posts) users have made. What I want to do is let users click on a comment to see more information in a separate panel (ie, other database fields that weren’t initially shown, for example the user_id of the person who posted the comment).

In my _post.html.erb, I have something like:

<div class="post" id="<%= post.post_id %>" onclick = ?? >
<p>post.text</p></div>

What should go in onclick? I need a way for the onclick to call a helper/controller method which can load more information, and then put that in another div on a page (I’ve tried variations of using the controller and helper to call javascript which inserts html into the site, but that seems messier than it should be). From what I understand, I should create some kind of partial _postdetails.html.erb file that handles the actual displaying of the html, but I have no idea how to specific where that partial would go in the page.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

You can achieve what you want either by using Rails helpers or by writing the AJAX calls yourself.

Personally I manually write all my AJAX calls using jQuery.
You can also use Prototype which ships with Rails.

That being said you can do.

In your JS file :

$("div.some-class").click(function()
{
    $.ajax(
    {
      url:"url/to/controller/action",
      type:<GET>/<POST>,
      data://If you wish to sent any payload
    });
});

In your controller :

def some_action
  #some computation
  render :update do |page|
    page["id_of_div_to_be_refreshed"].replace_html :partial => "some_partial"
  end
end