Question

I’d been working on my little project for several month before I thought that may be my way of handling following problem is ‘somewhat’ not elegant in RoR and there are more conventional ways:

My service use some javaScript API to retrieve information from particular social network service and processing of information is performed on client side and JS environment stores result of processing. so I need to interact with user without reloading the page: particularly there are some filters I need to work.

let’s say I need to filter results of request by age of publication. And there are categories selectors. I want my application works in the following way:
1. user types number of days within publication’s age should be – there’s no any ‘submit’ or ‘apply’ filter buttons
2. filters are being applied after user clicks on category-selectors: they are main UI controllers, formed by RoR helper:

<li class="cat_selector"><%= link_to category.name, posts_path(:cat_id => category.id), :remote => true%></li>

what is the ‘usual’ method to address this problem? How can I easily ‘gather’ all control’s values in one ajax request by clicking on one of particular links?
thank you!

Answer 1

I would abandon the default rails Ajax handling and write your own, something along the lines of

$('.cat_selector a').click(function(){
   $.ajax({
      url: this.href,
      data: $("#some_form").serialize()
   })
})

This would cause matching links to submit themselves over ajax adding data from the form with the id some_form. You could of course build up an arbitrary data object but it’s a lot easier to use a form if you can.