Question

I basically want to prevent searches that are less than 3 characters long.

In Rails 2.x, I would just do this in an onClick event. I understand how to handle AJAX requests and responses in Rails 3 now, but wouldn’t using the onClick event be considered obtrusive in Rails 3?

Answer 1

Got it!
I put this code in application.js:

// Place your application-specific JavaScript functions and classes here
// This file is automatically included by javascript_include_tag :defaults
$(function() {
    $("#search_submit").click(function() {
        if ($("#search_value").val().length < 3) {
            alert("You must supply 3 or more characters in your search.");
            return false;
        }
    })
})

My form is:

  <%= form_for(@search, { :remote => true, :html => { :id => 'left', :class => "custom-border" } }) do |f| %>
    <h2><%= f.label :value, "Search By Part or Interchange #" %></h2>
    <p><%= f.text_field :value %></p>
    <p class="button"><%= f.submit "Search" %></p>
  <% end %>

Voilá!