I've been trying to solve the following challenge all day without any luck.
When going through forum posts I came across jQuery and AJAX which are both new concepts to me and which I'd rather skip for now, if possible.
I've got a partial, "navbar-left", which shows a list of all bank accounts in my model Account.
When the user clicks on one of the items in the list, all transactions of that account should be shown in the same page at the right. The partial below links to a new page which is not how I'd like it.
The navbar-partial:
<ul class="nav nav-pills nav-stacked">
<% #accounts.each do |account| %>
<li role="presentation"><%= link_to account.account_holder, account_mutations_path(account.id) %></li>
<% end %>
</ul>
Any tips on how to get this fixed is much appreciated!
The page with the navbar at the left
The mutations in a separate page instead of a partial
Either you're sending viewers to a new page, or dynamically loading content within their current page.
If the latter, then the only solution is AJAX.
Luckily, Ruby on Rails makes transitioning from one to the other very easy.
Here is a gist of how it works:
<%= link_to account.account_holder, account_mutations_path(account.id), remote: true %>
This was pointing back to some page previously (e.g. action.html.erb).
Because of remote: true, it's going to be sending JS directly to the browser instead of a new HTML page (e.g. action.js.erb in the same view folder and same action name).
Here we can control the behavior we want by rendering a partial using ERB and using JS to change the HTML content of some part of the page:
// action.js.erb
$('#some_element').html('<%= j render "partial" %>')
Which will insert the HTML of the partial directly into the JQuery that changes the content dynamically.
Where j is a shorthand for escape_javascript.
Without escaping, the Ruby output is interpreted as file output and newlines would break your JS.
Example JS output without escaping:
// Bad
$('#some_element').html('<span>Content</span>
<span>More Content</span>')
Example with escaping:
// Good
$('#some_element').html('<span>Content</span>\n<span>More Content</span>')
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/working_with_javascript_in_rails.html
https://launchschool.com/blog/the-detailed-guide-on-how-ajax-works-with-ruby-on-rails
There are more great examples online and even Railscasts.
Really AJAX is the best way to do this, and it's not as complicated as you might think. But if you really want to skip AJAX then your best approach is probably to load ALL transactions for all accounts, in different div's and then show or hide them based on which is clicked.
For a rudimentary introduction to this look at javascript tabs... you click on a tab, the appropriate information is shown.
http://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_tabs.asp
You can do this very simply without ajax. The big difference would be - it's not the same page. One page would be the account#index (as you have now), the other page is the account#show page.
For the show page, use a very similar view as the index page, the left side would include the partial with one of the account li class="active" to highlight the account you are currently on. For the right side of the page, render the account mutations list items.
Related
I have a directory filled with partials. I'm looking to list ONLY the first h1 tags in each partial. The methods to accomplish this task could probably be modified to grab other elements as well.
Right now I use ruby to open each file, print out the first few characters, close file, and repeat. My ruby file parsing skills are limiting me. Here's the code I have at the moment:
<% Dir["app/views/partials/show/*.html.erb"].each do |f1| %>
<% aFile = File.open(f1, "r") %>
<% if aFile %>
<% content = aFile.sysread(20) %>
<p><%= content %></p>
<% else %>
<%= "Unable to open file!" %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
I also think I'm opening the entire partial in memory? Wondering If I can just read up until I find my h1 tag then close file and move on? Again I'm only reading first 20 characters because I haven't yet grasped a way to search for the first h1 tag.
I'll make edits as I work through the open, parse, piece... I appreciate any guidance and direction you can offer. Thanks!
EDIT:
Based on comments below there may be a far better way to accomplish my task. So I'm providing some additional background to get direction on other solutions.
This is for a slide show based on partials in a directory. The slide show is controlled with a navigation element which I would like to populate by the h1 tags in the partials. I'm not going to manually enter these things every time a change is made! I want the end user to simply drag and drop partials into a directory (with a certain name convention and h1 tag description for navigation) and let the slide show do everything else.
I could impose a class on the h1 tag "forNavigation" and on the content "sliderContent" and then use jquery to create a post load <ul> but that doesn't seem right. Plus they'll all be part of the same rendered div.
I guess I'm not clear why reading the first 50 characters of a partial, copying whats in the h1 tags, and putting it in a isn't the most elegant solution?
Like I said, above does everything needed except copy and print whats between the first h1 tag... With an xml parser or some regexp it'll be done. I'm just no good with parsing files.
Please let me know other methods to approach this. Right now I still think it's best to parse the partial (with or without rendering) and put what I need where I want it as needed.
Partials are not meant to be "parsed", but to be rendered inside other partials and templates. If you need to grab a part of a partial, you should probably extrat that part as a further partial, and use that inner partial in both the "listed" partial and in the "aggregated" view.
I'm very new to Rails (and web) programming, so I'm not even sure what technology I should be looking for for this.
I've downloaded and run through the first five chapters of the Rails tutorial, but now have a very simple request.
On the left hand side of a web page, I will have a table. If the user clicks on an element in that table, I want to have the right hand side of the page show something new.
I already have a page to display the table, viz:
<div class="center hero-unit">
<div class="container">
<h2>2012 Yearly Report</h2>
<div class="row-fluid">
<div class="span12">
<div class="span4">
<table border="1">
</table>
</div>
<div class="span6">
<!-- load stuff here based on what someone clicks on in the table -->
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
And I'm using bootstrap layouts to display everything. I just don't understand how to change the contents of the 'span6' div based on user behavior in 'span4'.
This is a difficult question to answer. It really depends on what kind of data you're trying to display and what sort of interactivity you're looking for.
You don't really provide much information about what you're trying to accomplish, but if I had to guess, you're trying to load data from your database and insert it into an element without leaving the current page. This is what AJAX is for (your tutorial goes into it a bit in chapter 11) and involves a good deal of javascript, which is generally beyond the scope of a server side language like Ruby. Luckily, rails includes helpers for making it easy to include AJAX features into your web application without having to write a lot of javascript (although you'll have to write some).
As an example, suppose your table has a list of articles, and you want to display the contents of an article in a div when its link is clicked on.
First the link:
<%= link_to article.name, article_url(article), :remote => true %>
The remote option tells Rails that it's an AJAX link.
Next, you need to render a javascript template for your article's show action. You'll name it show.js.erb.
Supposing the div you want the data to be loaded into looks like this,
<div id='article-content'></div>
you'll want your show.js.erb to contain the following:
$('#article-content').html("<%=javascript_escape #article.content %>");
This javascript (with embedded ruby) code will be evaluated when one of your remote links is clicked and will replace the content of your div with the article's content.
There is plenty of resources online to give you more information. It looks like railscasts just released an episode on this topic just a week ago. It requires a subscription to view, but is well worth it (especially if you're just starting out).
I'm using Kaminari pagination on a site, and when the user leaves the page and clicks the back link it goes back to the first page.
What I want is for the back link to go to the same page left. I know I should use a session variable for this, but I'm pretty new to Ruby On Rails so I'm not 100% positive on the syntax here.
Would love some help.
<%= link_to_function "Back", "history.go(-1);return true;" %>
I should add that it's a good practice to code links to pages as <a> tags rather than creating a form in your HTML for that purpose.
If you need to style the link to look like a button, do that in the CSS.
I'm still a beginner at web development. It's not my profession. So go easy.
I started building a rails app today, and realized it would make my application so much better if I could get certain links to display in a separate div instead of a new page, or refreshing the entire page. I'm not quite sure how to search for this, and I keep chasing red herrings with google.
Basically, I have a list in a div on the left side of the page, and when one item from that list is clicked, it should appear in the right div. (Nothing else on the page need be changed)
That's really as simple as it is. Do I need to use Javascript for this? Can I get away with the rails js defaults, or should I be using JQuery?
Is there a way to do this without javascript? I really just need a push in the right direction here, I'm tired of not even knowing how to search for this, or what documentation I should be reading.
Like I said, go easy, and you should just go ahead and err to the side of caution, and assume I know nothing. Seriously. :)
Thanks in advance,
-Kevin
(By the way, I'm developing with Rails 3)
Create your views (along with controllers) to be shown inside the div for each item on the left menu. Lets say we have the following structure now:
Item1 (Clicking on it will fetch:
http://myapp.com/item1)
Item2 (Clicking on it will fetch:
http://myapp.com/item2)
and so on...
make sure you only render the html to be put inside your content div. Should not include <head> <body> etc. tags
In your main page you may have your markup like this >
<div id="leftMenu">
Item 1
Item 2
</div>
<div id="content">
Please click on an item on the left menu to load content here
</div>
Finally, add the following Javascript (you'll need jQuery; trust me it's a good decision).
$("#leftMenu a").click(function () {
$("#content").load($(this).attr("href")); //load html from the url and put it in the #content element
return false; //prevent the default href action
});
You will need JavaScript if you want to avoid reloading the page. You can use link_to for links in your lists, and you'll need to use :remote => true to make it send AJAX requests to the server. The server will need to respond appropriately and supply HTML for your div.
link_to documentation is here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#method-i-link_to (and admittedly it isn't very useful for AJAX functionality).
The last post in this thread shows one possible solution you could use.
i want to render a partial within a view. so that when button MORE is clicked everything stays the same just additional characters are shown. in my case the whole article.
<%= #article1.content[0..300] + "..." %>
<%= link_to "more", ....... %>
i dont know what the right methot would be. somehow i have to explain to rails that when button more is clicked it shows me the whole article. maybe i shouldn't use method link_to ..
thank you in advance for your replys
What you're looking for is link_to_remote or link_to_function.
link_to_remote will be fetching the rest of the article from your controller and replacing/appending to a DOM element with a partial via RJS. This allows you to minimize unnecessary data being sent, and facilitates handling users that have javascript disabled.
With link_to_function, the entire article will be served when the page is loaded, but the everything beyond the first 300 characters will be hidden by CSS. This is easier to set up but sends a lot more data, it also relies on the user having javascript enabled.
Without looking at the source the average user probably couldn't distinguish between the two methods.
Which choice you go with is up to you. Sorry, I haven't got time to provide code examples, but the internet is full of them.
try link_to_function, use truncate for part and insert hidden tag with full text, switch them using javascript in link_to_function