Render some content on Rails view - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am new to Rails, so I'm not sure if this is the correct way to go about doing this. I have a view that contains an AJAX link for a number of checkboxes in the form of
<% #row_headers.each do |row_header| %>
<% row_header_ = row_header.gsub(" ", "-") %>
<%= check_box_tag row_header_, row_header, params.key?(row_header_),
:data => { :remote => true,
:url => url_for(
controller: :web_pages,
action: :administratorswgraph} %> <%= row_header %>
<% end %>
<% end %>
This is being called from the :administratorswgraph view. Later on in the file I have
<% if not #swChart.nil? %>
<div id="swChart"></div>
<%= render_chart(#swChart, 'swChart') %>
<% end %>
Where render_chart is from the GoogleVisualr library. On the controller I have
def administratorswgraph
headers = []
#row_headers.each_with_index do |row_header, i|
if params.key? row_header.gsub(" ", "-")
headers.push i
end
end
if headers.empty?
#swChart = nil
else
#swChart = MakeSiteChart(headers, 580, 480)
end
end
Where the MakeSiteChart function returns a GoogleVisualr object based on the checkboxes. What I want is that for every time the checkbox's state is changed a new chart is made and shown. I can tell from my debugger, that indeed <%= render_chart(#swChart, 'swChart') %> is getting called in the view whenever a checkbox's state is changed, however the display in the browser is never updated. How do I get the display in the browser to show the chart?
Edit
I was able to get control of the ajax event by using the following method
$('#<%= #row_headers[0].gsub(" ", "-") %>').on('ajax:success', function(event, xhr, settings) {
alert("HERE")
});
For testing purposes I'm only hooking up the first checkbox. However, I'm not sure how to parse the arguments, how to get the chart, and how to insert it back into the DOM.

Answer 1

If your controller is RESTful then web_pages#administratorswgraph can answer to html and ajax with separate view (say administratorswgraph.html.erb and administratorswgraph.js.erb).
Place in administratorswgraph.js.erb all your logic responsible for replacing the entire chart... I think its enough to place <%= render_chart(#swChart, 'swChart') %> there, but Im not sure.

Answer 2

assuming that you are using jQuery and so jQuery-UJS, you can hook into the AJAX-Callbacks and replace the chart in your dom with the response that came from the server: https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs/wiki/ajax
unfortunately, there is no good example for this on guides.rubyonrails.org...

Answer 3

After messing around with this a lot I was able to come up with a satisfactory solution. I used the following JavaScript within the view
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" id ="myScript">
<% #row_headers.each do |row_header| %>
$('#<%= row_header.gsub(" ", "-") %>').bind('ajax:success', function(event, data, status, xhr) {
var scripts = $(data).filter('script')
var chartScript;
scripts.each(function(index, Element){
if (Element.text.indexOf("swChart") != -1 && Element.id != "myScript") {
chartScript = Element.text;
}
});
jQuery.globalEval(chartScript)
});
<% end %>
</script>
This allowed me to extract the JavaScript that needed to be run after the ajax request came back and I was able to run it.