Question

I would like add Javascript/jQuery code to my Rails 3 application that will get data from the server and update the page accordingly.

I thought to use jQuery’s $.get() method:

$.get("/get_data_about_page?page=5", function(data) {
  alert("Returned data: [" + data + "]");
});

However, I don’t want users to access get_data_about_page via URL.

How could I disable such access ?

Answer 1

Realistically you can’t stop someone from scraping it if they’re determined…

You could set a variable in the session when the main page is loaded and then protect the AJAX action so that it only responds if the session variable is set – this would prevent naive use of the URL but it’s not foolproof.