I have a page which has three components: suggested items, suggested people, and a post feed. When a GET request is issues on this page, I have two options:
1) In the controller/action for the page, I can fetch the suggested items, suggested people, and the posts making up the feed and then display the page with all the data at once.
2) In the controller/action for the page, I don’t do much. I can use ajax on the page to make three independent requests to a controller/action for suggested items, a controller/action for suggested people, and a controller/action for the post feed and let their js.erb files populate the page with the fetched content.
First of all, is option (2) even possible? If so, it seems as if it is more modular since I can reuse that logic for other pages which also need to display suggested items, suggested people, etc… This is obviously at the cost of making more requests.
Which method is recommended? Pros/cons?
Thanks.
Well Any day I would suggest having a single call instead of 3 separate calls. As you mentioned you have a cost of making three different requests also the other reason for the same is the restriction on the number of concurrent connections to a domain on certain browsers (2 for IE7). Also think about your webserver and the maximum requests it can handle as the number of users increase.
Also you can still make it modular by having all the three actions and have an action that will call these three actions and aggregate the results if that is even possible as I am not too sure about the Rails architecture.
Hope this helps.