Question

I am very new to jquery and Ajax. I’m working with an ActiveX control that draws little sketch documents. When users save a new sketch using this control I send the data back to the server using Ajax. One of my requirements it to show a list of thumbnails in the page of existing sketches.
For this list I’ve deiced to simply use a table, however the problem is what would be the very best way to manage this table using AJax?

I can think of several way to do this:

1. Have the Ajax request respond with
   an entire new table with all of the
   sketch thumb nail links,
2. or I could respond with all of the rows.
3. Another possibility I can think of is to not respond with html at
   all but with JSon data that has all of the information I need to build the table and then use Jquery to build the table and append new rows or delete new rows as the users create and delete sketches.
4. Something else.

What approach would you use?

Answer 1

The important question is this: “Where should the ‘visual display’ part of your code live? Mostly on the server, or mostly on the javascript client?”

Myself, I would send JSON back to the client (#3) and then have the client be responsible for putting the images into a table, using one of a variety of Javascript templating systems, like EJS. This way the server-side doesn’t have to care about how things look, it just has a fairly basic responsibility to organize data and objects.