Question

My target result is when a user clicks a link, to have that pop up an overlay that contains a new page loaded from the server with AJAX.

The way I’m doing this is using Prototype Overlay (I’m using Prototype for AJAX) to create the dialog, and after the dialog is created, I’m calling:

new Ajax.Updater("div_inside_the_dialog",
                 "url_for_the_content",
                 {method: 'get', requestHeaders:{Accept:'text/javascript'}});

I also added into my url_for_the_content controller:

respond_to do |format|
  format.js
  format.html
end

So when the link is clicked, it creates a dialog, my controller for url_for_the_content, which sees that I’m making a JavaScript request, and returns some stuff to display inside the dialog.

It works okay, but it strikes me as very odd that I had to manually code that I’m looking for a JavaScript return in the request header, and then what I return isn’t actually JavaScript, it’s just a bunch of html for the dialog.

On the other hand, I don’t want to create a special controller method just for this, because it’s not really its own action conceptually since it’s displaying the same thing as an existing action, just formatted differently. Also, I’d have to disable layouts for it, and I would never want users to be able to visit it directly, not inside an AJAX dialog.

Can anyone provide any feedback on how I’m approaching this whole process, on any part of what I’m doing?

Answer 1

I am not too familiar with the way you are calling the Ajax updated but I prefer simply rendering forms via Ajax, which should also make it clearly why you would manually be coding in a request for a Javascript return in your request header. The way I usually do it is save a js.erb file in the views folder corresponding to your controller name. So in Views/(Controller_Name)/ I have a file called (Action_Name).js.erb which would look something as follows:

$("div_to_update").update("<%= escape_javascript(render('updateform')) %>")

Simply doing that will allow you to call any form that you want with AJAX. Similarly something like this allows you to simply update whatever content you need to in whichever way necessary. Hope this helps