I’m trying to make an AJAXy submission and have the resulting partial be inserted into my list at the proper place. I can think of a few options, but none is terribly good:
Option 1: Return JSON, do rendering in Javascript. That seems like the wrong place to render this, especially since the list itself is rendered in my application server. It has the benefit, though, of making it easy to access the value to be sorted (response.full_name).
Option 2: Return an HTML fragment, parse the sort value out. Parsing HTML in Javascript is probably worse than rendering it.
Option 3: Return an HTML fragment that also contains a <script> section that gets evaluated. This could add the DOM node to a master list and then make a JS call to insert itself at the right point. The downside here is that IE doesn’t evaluate <script> tags when innerHTML or appendChild are called.
Personally I would do #1. Nothing is wrong with combining the server-side generated HTML with the client-side generated one, but if it is a complicated procedure it is better to keep it in one place (on the server in your case). So you may want to return (as JSON) two values: the sort value, and the HTML snippet.
After that it is simple: find the position, instantiate the snippet (e.g., using dojo.html.set()), and place it with dojo.place(). Or instantiate it directly in-place.