Question

In a non-AJAX web app, the URL would contain my view parameters (e.g. mysite?page=2&sort=name). In an AJAX app, where do I store the same info? In the Session object?

Answer 1

I’m assuming you want to know how to pass additional params with an AJAX call. This really depends on how you’re formulating the AJAX call.

If you’re using the built-in Rails helpers, you can pass additional params inside the url_for helper. For example, lets say that you have a products route and you want to AJAX load a list of all products. The link_to helper might look something like this (Rails 3.2)

link_to "All Products", products_path(:page => 2, :sort => "name"), :remote => true

If on the other hand you’re using a JavaScript framework like jQuery, you can pass additional params using the data option. For example

$.ajax({
    url: "/products",
    data: {
        page: 2,
        sort: "name"
    },
    success: function(data) {
        // handle success
    },
    failure: function(data) {
        // handle failure
    }
 });

Storing this data (page, sort, etc.) can be done multiple ways also. The easiest way would be to store this data inside a JavaScript variable.

window.page = 2;
window.sort = "name";

Another solution is to store this information in the data attribute of a particular DOM element on the page. For example, if you have a <div id='products'> that contains a list of the paginated, sorted products, you could store the information like this (jQuery)

$("#products").data("page", 2);
$("#products").data("sort", "name");