Question

I’m trying to add some client-side list grouping functionality into my Rails app. It’s basically a user list view where the user model would have different groupable attributes, like e-mail, name, title, etc… I was thinking of having the model include a def groupable that would return a hash containing all that model instance’s groupable values. The keys would be fixed, known strings, that could be localized from the view. e.g. user.name= "Group by name", user.title= "Group by title", etc…

The controller would retrieve the user models in def index like normal, but it would also call groupable on each one and build an object that the view can use to generate a JavaScript variable/hash/JSON which I could use from JavaScript/jQuery to to the grouping on the client-side. I can also pre-group the list in the view, like by default all users are grouped by name alphanumeric.

The idea is to allow for client-side groupings that don’t require a page refresh.

I expect the usual method of using a partial and some AJAX could do the trick, but I was hoping the user list wouldn’t have to be reloaded each time the grouping was changed.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I switched to a dynamic, pure JavaScript + jQuery list grouping implementation without the need for Rails served grouping content to the view. It’s much more flexible this way and I kind of consider JS a requirement for more advanced features like grouping and other features, so with JS turned off, the listing would work fine, with it on you get grouping, highlighting, client-side instant search, etc…