Question

I’m not really experienced with web development especially on views , I need a simple explanation (and pointers to a resource would be really nice as well) on how to deal with rendering a layout or a template partially without rendering whole page again…

What is the best practice?

Does Sitemesh layouts provide this? if so how ?

Shall I use JQuery pass the data as JSON from controller and update the corresponding div with “.html()” ? (which i did something like this a long time ago for some basic stuff, and think this is not really a grails way to do it)

or <g:include> does this for me?

Everything I read about this confused me even more 🙂

Actually the question is, what is the best practice in Grails to handle partial page updates (with Ajax or without ajax if there is any other ways these days)

Thanks in advance

EDIT:

this tutorial actually gives a really good idea of how to do it

Answer 1

What is the best practice?

The usual practice is to submit an AJAX request (i.e. a HTTP request triggered from JavaScript), and use a JavaScript callback function that updates a section of the page when a response is returned.

Does Sitemesh layouts provide this? if so how ?

When an AJAX request is received on the server-side, you could layout the response using Sitemesh in the same way that you can layout the response of a non-AJAX request. Sitemesh doesn’t know or care what kind of request is being processed or whether it’s laying out a whole page or just a fragment.

Shall I use JQuery pass the data as JSON from controller and update the corresponding div with “.html()”

Have a look at the tags provided by Grails that have the word “remote” somewhere in the tag name. They provide a very simple way to perform common AJAX tasks within a Grails application. For example, to submit an AJAX request to an action named bookByName and add the response to an element with id foo, simply add the following tag to your page.

<g:remoteFunction action='bookByName' update='foo'/>