I am developing an eCommerce gem with Rails. I am trying to keep as much of the code in the app as possible. I want to make updates to, say, the shopping cart through Ajax, and then return data and an event back to allow the view to be noted in the view.
I am looking for a way to determine what becomes available to my JavaScript when and Ajax call is returned. I want to track the event, and so forth.
I am looking more for advice here than an answer, but what kind of testing framework are developers generally using for this?
I use RSpec, Capybara, and FactoryGirl for unit, request, and controller testing currently.
This should be helpful: Setting up javascript testing on a rails app with konacha
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I'm about to start a new project and I am unsure if using AngularJS for my front end would be a good idea not. I've read about people saying this isn't the smartest way of doing a project. And even if I did, Is there a way to get AngularJS to interact with the controllers? This question may be redundant but I am actually curious of how to effectively do this without it being a waste of time.
I've never completely done it, but I believe the way to go is to build a Rails api and then have a separate Angular project use said api. The api could also be used to build a mobile app. I think the Angular project would still need to be served from a Node.js server in production, but I don't think that would be a big deal.
This is what I used to learn how to build a Rails api: http://apionrails.icalialabs.com/book/chapter_one
You can do it within an existing project and share the models from it.
There are several different approaches to accomplish that. I tried about 5 different guides out there, the best I found (and I finally sticked to) was https://thinkster.io/angular-rails - This guide should help you build a basic CRUD app with angular connected to rails.
You use Rails as an JSON RESTful API which responds to Ajax-Requests (Get, Post, Put, Delete). Angular will handle the frontend stuff - sending those Ajax requests to the routes/methods defined in your rails controllers. So yes, of course your AngularJS app can interact with your rails controllers.
This also helped me to understand the setup in the beginning: Instead of the Rails View, you will be using AngularJS as your view:
I really love using angular with rails, because setting up the JSON responses (especially with Active Model Serializer Gem) is very easy and quickly done. i deffinitely can recommend it, and I have not encountered any unsolvable problems - so far.
Just go trough this guide I linked and you will see if this setup fits your needs.
The short answer is that your Rails application will have to present some kind of a public API for your AngularJS application to consume. Angular (and it's brethren, like React and Ember) runs client-side, on the browser, and it needs "something" to make AJAX calls against. That "something", i.e. your backend, can be Firebase, Parse, AWS Lambdas, Rails API, etc. Since you already have a Rails application, it probably makes the most sense to add some RESTful API endpoints that use the existing models (and possibly controllers) to consume/produce JSON payloads from/for the client.
I managed to get rack-mini-profiler gem to run fine on the full pages we serve in our app. What I didn't manage is, how to directly get the data also for one of the calls we serve via ajax to another page. I found, that if I do the ajax call and then call one of our full page requests, I see also the ajax timing, but this is kind of cumbersome to do.
Do you have any tips on how to see the small menu also directly on the page where the ajax call is done? Our ajax call is returning html and there would be enough space to show the menu.
My apologies for responding with an indirect answer to your question. But, I highly recommend the Chrome Extension (and associated gems) Rails Panel, particularly for investigating Ajax/Async calls with Rails.
I use it daily at work and find it to be a great tool.
Once you've added rack-miniprofiler to your bundle, then you need to set disable_caching = true. You can do this in an initializer:
# config/initializers/rack_profiler.rb
if Rails.env.development?
Rack::MiniProfiler.config.disable_caching = true
end
I am completely new to Backbone.js (have only studied the documentation) and was wondering if it's possible to test its functionality with maybe a Controller or two in a Rails app? I have some functionality I would love to build into my existing application that could highly benefit from backbone, but I am just wanting to "test the waters" with Backbone in my application.
I don't have much experience with Rails, but that would definitely be possible. The best way to play around with Backbone for a small piece would be to add a new Backbone view to your app. Leave an element in your app that you can tack on a Backbone View with and play around with.
I'm trying to submit input to the form, and parse the results in a RoR app. I've tried using mechanize, but it has some trouble with the way the page dynamically updates the results. It doesn't help that most fields are hidden.
Is there anyway to get mechanize to do what I'm looking for, or are there any alternatives to mechanize which I can use?
So whenever I want to do something like this, I go with the gem selenium-webdriver. It spawns a real browser (supports all major brands) and lets you control it with ruby code. You can do almost everything a real user could do. In addition, you have access to the (rendered) dom, so javascript generated content is not a problem.
Performance is much slower than with pure library clients, so its not a good fit for use in a web request cycle.
http://rubygems.org/gems/selenium-webdriver
My goal is to create a Rails based site that uses AJAX to fetch different sections. The site should never completely refresh. I'm using Rails 3.2.8.
There's a lot of conflicting articles online about how to actually implement this. It seems to me that simply fetching pages.json and using javascript would accomplish my goal, but is that the "rails" way?
Every page that is users will see is static. I'll be using Rails as an admin to CRUD them, but that's it, and that portion doesn't need to be AJAX.
Take a look at backbone.js. For an ajax heavy site, that's exactly what you need to help organize your code and keep your front end consistent with your database. Also, check out this excellent railscast on implementing backbone in a rails project.
I noticed that you said static site. Well, if the site is completely static, why bother with something like rails? I would suggest just coding it in html and javascript because rails is intended to be used for dynamic, database driven sites.