Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3.0.9 and jQuery 1.6.2 I am trying to implement an AJAX HTTP request handling JSON data with-in a partial template data rendered.

What I would like to make is render a partial template (performing the rendering process in a controller action and using the render_to_string RoR method, as well) and put the rendered HTML in that JSON data. However, I have some problem on parsing the JSON data with jQuery and I think because in the partial template there are " and ' characters that break the JSON format. In fact, if I render a “simple text” instead of the partial all works.

How can I solve this issue? What do you advice about?

P.S.: I think a similar issue is discussed in this topic…

Answer 1

It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but you could use js.erb to update your views dynamically.

Tell the controller to respond to js format:

respond_to do |format|
  format.js
end

create action_name.js.erb in your controller’s view folder similar to this:

# categories/show.js.erb
$("#content").html("<%= escape_javascript(render 'categories/_category') %>");

It doesn’t return JSON, instead it returns the complete rendered HTML of your partial. If you need to render a view file (without the leading underscore in the name), you’ll need to pass a :file option and specify the extension of the file.