Question

I was under the impression that you could put javascript in a view template in Rails 3. For example, if I had this html in views/public/home.html.erb

<div id="block">click</div>

then in views/public/home.js.erb, I thought I could put the following javascript, and then click on html to trigger the javascript. However, when I tested it, I got no results. But if I put the javascript in assets/javascript/application.js, then everything worked fine…Shouldn’t it also work if it was in a js template with the same name as the html view?

$(document).ready(function(){       

test(); 
}); 


function test() {

    $("#block").click(function() { 

         $('#block').hide();

       });

 }

Answer 1

Javascript shouldn’t be added as a view file (bla.js.erb). They must be put in assets/javascripts or at least in lib or vendor directory.

You must also require them in your application.js file, if you already don’t use require_tree.

In this way you won’t need to reference the javascript in any way in your view (the application.js will include it for you). Otherwise, you need to specify a layout to insert javascript files in block, because views are rendered after tag.

There are a lot of reason not to put javascript directly in html (except for tests obviusly), read the rails asset pipeline for more information.

When you create a view with a different extension from html.erb that will be used only if your url specify a format with that extension, for example mywebsite/users.json will return eventually a index.json.erb.

For AJAX you would like to return a JSON object, not javascript which is definitely not a correct approach. Remember that you are using a framework and you should follow it’s guidelines. If you want to live it’s rails, it will be hard to work with it.