Question

I’m not quite understanding how requests are handled in rails, in my controller, I have something like this:

def method_to_handle_request
  # do stuff
end

Then in the view I have this JavaScript:

$.post("/", {method_to_handle_request: "value"}, function(data) {
  // do something with data
});

This is wrong: data in the JavaScript ends up just being the page. Thus, my question is: how do I handle requests in rails? I’ve been reading “Agile Web Development With Rails”, and the section there doesn’t make too much sense to me.
Thanks

Answer 1

Rails uses configured routes to point to the appropriate controller action. You have to specify a route in your config/routes.rb file to send your request through the desired action. In your controller, you’ve defined the method_to_handle_request. You have to make sure that you define a route for that. There are many ways to do this within the routes.rb file and those are well documented in this guide.

Then in your method_to_handle_request you should render/format your output as JSON or XML or whatever you want your view to consume. If you don’t do this you’ll end up just getting the flat templated HTML back. Here’s a good resource for rendering views that has a section on JSON in particular.

So here’s a quick example of what I mean:

in config/routes.rb

resources :foos do
  member do
    post 'do_my_foo'
  end
end

in foos_controller.rb

def do_my_foo
  foo = Foo.find(params[:id])
  # do some things to poor ole foo
  some_cool_data_about_foo = ...

  respond_to do |format|
    format.json { render :json => some_cool_data_about_foo }
  end
end

Then when you call it with ajax you’ll get the JSONified data in your handler.

Geeze, I hope this is what you were asking…