I'm actually making a rails app for a music band. And they recently asked for a music streamer to play music throughout the whole application.
As they're on bandcamp, I thought that I might as well do that via the iframes they provide, before building a javascript streaming feature in some time.
But, here's the issue : when you put an iframe in your application.html.erb, it's reloading itself everytime the user is loading a new page. Exactly as if the code wasn't in the layout, but on every pages instead.
So far I've tried some stuff, like putting the iframe in a partial and calling it via : render 'layouts/shared/music_widget', but the issue stay the same.
As I've found nothing on the web so far, I'm guessing I've missed something ( maybe I lack some knowledge in rails' basic magic )... so, I'd be glad if someone here could help me with this one.
Thanks !
That’s because when you reload, a completely new page is generated and downloaded by your browser. The whole HTML is replaced with every HTTP request. To achieve what you want, you’d have to look into asynchronous solutions and SPA’s (Single-page Applications), basically having only one page and replacing the content of it using AJAX.
I suggest using batman.js, a great library which makes it relatively easy to switch to AJAX page loading using Rails. A big advantage is that it was built with Rails in mind, and as such it couldn’t be more simple to integrate it with your current application. However it does require you to learn CoffeeScript.
Alternatives include AngularJS, Ember.js, Backbone.js, each of them having gems helping with Rails integration.
I am sure there are many more, but I listed the most popular choices. You could also create your own JavaScript to handle that. The easiest solution in such a case would be to have the big <div> containing everything but the iframe; bind to the click event of a elements with a special attribute set (for example data-ajax="true"), make an AJAX request to the URL specified in href, and replace the content of the big <div> with the response.
In any case, you’ll need to read more about Single-page Applications.
I am working on a similar project which requires the use of iframe to play music thoughout the website. For that I used two layouts, one is the application.html.erb and another one is called player.html.erb
Now Application .html.erb is the one which contains header, footer and the iframe. And the other layout does not contain any of these and is the one which is used to for the actions to be opened in the url.
Related
I would like to convert an existing rails app with multiple models,controllers and views to a single page app (SPA). How can I render views for each model not as separate html pages, but as sections of the main page (say a div for each section), which could be navigated to by scrolling vertically? Is it possible to get the same user experience, I mean specifically vertical scrolling, in a standard MVC Rails app?
Well, to convert a standard rails app to a Single Page Application(SPA) you need to hook it to a MVC front - end framework. The html that was being rendered by the rails calls previously will now be fed into the front-end MVC framework which will render portions of a page instead of the complete page by making AJAX calls.
Nothing at all changes with the models and almost the whole of controller codes also stay untouched.
As a front-end MVC framework you can look into angular.js which is from the google stable of products or backbone.js which I personally find great. In fact there's a whole host of other frameworks ranging from heavy and full- featured like ember.js to minimal and necessary like handlebar.js
If you're looking for tutorials, tutsplus has a tutorial on backbone on rails that I know of. Hope this gets you started.
You have to render the views in the page you want to display ,there is noting to do with model and controller code ..
for this refer following link
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html
It's perfectly possible, you should call your actions through javascript instead of html so that each actions return a portion of the page you want to modify instead of reloading the whole page.
Example, suppose you want to add a user to a list of user:
when you click the add button you make a ajax post to your controller.
this actions responds to the js format with a javascript file (controller_action.js.erb)
This js file will evaluate a partial template corresponding to a single line of your table (_user.html.erb), find your table and append the evaluated html to the table
Have a look at :
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/working_with_javascript_in_rails.html
Specifically this section which answers your question with example :
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/working_with_javascript_in_rails.html#server-side-concerns
Try turbolinks gem
Your app will be similar to one page application with less efforts and less time.
I'm doing an app with jQuery Mobile and Angular.js. Cause we have some issues using both libs, exists an adapter that do "teh job".
So I'm trying using routeProvider to route my pages. But I still can't render pages using this.
Here plunker if u can help show me the way.
http://plnkr.co/edit/DNGiT83csWMmfYnHXOop
Thanks in advance!
I ran into a similar problem and maybe what I learned might help you. It comes down to the differences in the way angular and jquery go from one page/section to another (routing).
First, the basics: angular routes by inserting a chunk of html into your view, then on whatever click/action/etc, removing that html from the view and adding a new chunk of html. Essentially you're on the same page all the time; it's just the included html is changing. In contrast, think of jqm as loading up all the html into the same page, with those html chunks as divs. Instead of removing html chunks and replacing them (via routing), it's just turning divs off and on. (There are multi-page jqm apps but SPAs really highlight the differences.)
My suggestion is to pick which set of features you really want: angular's minimalistic loading (only as you need it), or jqm's flashy transitions and other built-in features. If you've got a massive app with a lot of data on every page, you might want to bypass jqm and use angular alone, and see what you can do with angular's new animate functions. It'll mean you'll need to build (via CSS or javascript) duplicates of the jqm features -- and from what I've seen, you can get close but it won't quite be as pleasantly streamlined as jqm.
If the jqm built-in features are what you really want, then skip using angular's routing. It'll just introduce all kinds of complications, anyway. Set up your pages using jqm's pattern, and use angular only where you're dealing with data.
What I've found works best is to treat it like it's a jqm app overall, and only add angular into the sections where you need it. After all, you don't have to add ng-app at the html line; you can add it into a single div as needed. Since jqm is happiest as a system-wide kind of thing, while angular is just fine being confined to pieces within a system, so far I've found jqm-whole and angular-parts to be the simplest way to get the best of both worlds.
Isotope lets you write templates in javascript. These templates can then be rendered by either the client (using plain-old javascript) or on the server (using Johnson).
The benefit is DRYer code. When updating the DOM on an ajax or web socket update, you can don't have to write a new partial...just point it to the one you already wrote.
Has anyone used this?
Interesting, I would have to try it, however , and I know not a lot of people do it, but I actually use HAML to template .js files. Although there is still that problem the author mentions , of each request being templated on the server and sending back html, unless you are sending loads of kb, or you have really, really high load site I don't think it's such a big deal.
Also ideally you shouldn't be even sending html data back and force, just JSON objects, which are rendered on the page by your ajax request. The only legitimate use I can see for this is if you have heavily ajax website, such as where you load a page once, and the you just keeping doing ajax requests for all interaction and javascript to manipulate view.
So it would help if you would clarify the final goal. Is this for some internal app where you control user environment ( you know for sure which browsers they will use, and that they will have fast enough computers to manipulate all this javascript?) Or is it going to be an app targeted towards 3rd world, where people don't have yet resources available to use all that fancy javascript.
All that said, it's an interesting concept, and I will try it our myself, to see how well it works.
This uses Johnson, which last I checked did not work on Ruby 1.9. So that might hint at some of the immaturity of this particular solution. Eventually the community will come up with something that works really well.
One approach I have used is to make 2 completely separate templates, but try to make them as similar as possible so that it is easy to port changes from one to the other.
This seems like a bad idea. In an Ajax application, I believe that the server should be responsible for rendering all display text. This makes i18n easier, and concentrates everything in one place. The JavaScript should simply receive data from the server, with all display text already rendered, and put it in the appropriate DOM object.
In other words, I believe that in an Ajax application, the need for a JS template engine is itself a design smell.
The situation is different in exclusively client-side JS applications, of course.
I am building a blog for myself. Because it is relevant, here is the link: http://www.codetunnel.com. As you can see the page loads via AJAX so that I can do some stylish loading effects, among other things. It's actually a web-terminal that accepts commands and arguments and processes them via ajax; my URL structure executes these commands based on the URL passed in so that different pages can have unique URLs even though they are loaded via ajax. I've done past projects like this but have never cared much about optimizing the site for search engines, until this one.
Would a blog post being loaded via AJAX hurt its ability to be found by web crawlers? I'm assuming it would but I want your opinions before I decide how to move forward.
Thank you!
It depends. If you use unobtrusive javascript and progressive enhancement meaning that in your page you have links:
#Html.ActionLink("foo bar", "foo")
which would be AJAXified in some external js file, web crawlers will follow those links as all normal links and if the server returns content this content will be indexed just as all other content of your site. But if the url is built with javascript, then, no, it won't be indexed as crawlers normally do not execute javascript. I would also recommend you providing a sitemap as well.
I would say yes it would as from what I know the search engine wont see the loaded content, just the content from the initial page load.
Unless you use some kind of progressive enhancement (see this presentation), the main problem is that search engines will load and index only initial stuff.
As per my experience in search engine optimization yes, it will hurt rankings of the website. But now Google has proposed a proposal through which you can use Ajax to load the pages and at the same time it won't hurt your SEO efforts.
I'm working on my first Ruby on Rails aplication and it's quite big (at least for me ;) - database has about 25 tables). I'm still learning Ruby and Rails and I never wrote anything in Javascript nor Ajax.
Should I add Ajax to my application from the beginning? Or maybe it will be better to add it latter?
Or in the other words: is it (relatively) easy to add ajax to existing web application?
Jeremy Keith has written a great article on this topic, which he refers to as Hijax
In short:
Plan for Ajax from the start.
Implement Ajax at the end.
Depends on how important Ajax is for the application. Since you are probably going to use Ajax for progressive usability enhancements only, I would say it is best to start with a traditional non-Ajax software, and add Ajax features only when you have the first features working. You can do this feature by feature, or write the whole software first, and then start ajaxing it.
Adding Ajax may be easier if you familiarize yourself with unobtrusive JavaScript techniques. Use jQuery instead of Prototype.js, or LowPro in addition to Prototype.js. For the latter, see e.g. Jarkko Laine's PDF book Unobtrusive Prototype.js.
If you are planning to do AJAX, I would do it from the beginning. It will help you structure your controller actions and views, especially with respect to generating some data in partial views, correctly from the very beginning. Knowing that some actions need to be able to render just parts of the page will change your design. This isn't to say that you can't go back and retrofit the design, but I think it's easier to get the design right if you design with this in mind up-front. You should also consider how to make it work without AJAX (or javascript at all), too so that your design is as fail-safe as possible. That doesn't mean that all functionality has to be available, but that important functionality works in the absence of javascript. For example, action links that use AJAX should have a default url that will invoke the correct action via a GET request if the javascript isn't enabled. Forms that post via AJAX should also work if posted normally. Dynamic behavior (like an image gallery) should have a usable, alternative view that works, etc.