Question

I finally had success passing data through AJAX and returning it in JSON. However, now I don’t know how to display it on my page.

here is my JS:

$(function() {
    $( "#selectable" ).selectable({
        selected: updatefilters,
        unselected: updatefilters
    });   
    function updatefilters(ev, ui){
        // get the selected filters
        var $selected = $('#selectable').children('.ui-selected');
        // create a string that has each filter separated by a pipe ("|")
        var filters = $selected.map(function(){return this.id;}).get().join("\|");
        $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: 'updatefilters',
            dataType: 'json', 
            data: { filters: filters },
            success: function(data){
                $('#board').replaceWith(data.content);
            }
        });
    }
});

after my model runs, it echos the following as discovered in firebug:

[{"thread_id":"226","owner_id":"1","subject":"trying to create a HUGE body for thread testi","body":"Firstly, I think 45 characters is perfect for the heading. \n\nHowever, once the body gets huge, I assume that the \"preview\" is going to get a bit out of hand if not truncated. I have truncated code in place...but it doesn't seem to be working.\n\nI'll have to keep testing to ensure we can get it shrunk down to a few hundred characters so as to not completely screw up the page format\n\nyadda yadda yadda...yadda yadda yadda...and more yadda yadda yadda...\n\nBabble Babble Babble Babble Babble \n\nBabble Babble Babble ","timestamp":"2012-05-02 15:29:19","replystamp":"2012-05-02 15:29:53","last_post_id":"1","slug":"226-trying-to-create-a-huge-body-for-thread-testi","replies_num":"1","views":"19"},{"thread_id":"219","owner_id":"3","subject":"testing icons","body":"hellow world","timestamp":"2012-05-01 11:37:08","replystamp":"2012-05-01 11:37:08","last_post_id":"3","slug":"219-testing-icons","replies_num":"0","views":"3"},{"thread_id":"212","owner_id":"1","subject":"This thread is based off entertainm","body":"Yay","timestamp":"2012-04-25 14:07:55","replystamp":"2012-04-25 14:07:55","last_post_id":"1","slug":"212-this-thread-is-based-off-entertainment","replies_num":"0","views":"4"}]

any advice on how to replace the div “board” with data from the returned JSON array would be incredibly helpful!

Answer 1

Let’s say you want to display the data in a table with subject and body. You could write like this:

success: function(data){
    var html = "<table>";
    for (i=0 ; i< data.length ; i++)
    {
        html += "<tr><td>" + data[i].subject + "</td><td>" + data[i].body + "</td></tr>";
    }
    html += "</table";
    $('#board').html(html);
} 

You get the idea. I also recommend looking into templating libraries mustache.js if you have time to investigate a nicer solution. That will let you separate your template from the data, and eliminate the ugly concatenation of HTML and data using Javascript. (Kind of a more advanced solution though, and you may want to just keep it simple.) Mustache.js engine allows you to write the above like this:

var template = "{{#item}}<tr><td>{{subject}}</td><td>{{body}}</td></tr>{{/item}}";
var html = "<table>" + mustache.render(template, data) + "</table>";
$("#board").html(html);