Question

I have a question regarding displaying and updating many elements from a Rails model in response to dynamic selection criteria within the view.

I am creating an application that will allow you to step through the “history” of a series of “events” stores as an ActiveRecord relation. Initially – I would like the user to select a date range which the events will be constrained within. The page should then load a table (or only part of table) beginning with the first event within the date range.

The user should then be able to use left/right buttons to step through the events table and a series of business figures will update dynamically in response to what event we are up to in the table i.e. after stepping through the first 5 events the total revenue figure will be the sum of revenue over these 5 events.

Ideally I also want to be able to display this information on a Google Visualization…

Is anyone able to point me in the right direction for how I should go about this? I understand the controller side processing to get the right selection from the database table but I am unsure how I should be handling requests with Ajax and how often I should be requiring a new request from the client.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks in adv.

Answer 1

AJAX requests are handled the same way as regular HTTP requests, you just have to make sure you have the right routes setup. The main different is that you usually will render a .js.erb file, instead of a .html.erb one (assuming you’re using ERB).

There’s a lot of material about this out in the Web, and one of the best starting points is the Rails Guides – http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html.

PS: Mind that your question is really broad, so it’s unlikely that you’ll good answers.