on my web site I want to have login/registration form in modal window done using facebox (jQuery plugin). What is better:
Create view with one method and template that has form and refer facebox to this view.
Create static HTML file in public directory and refer facebox to this static page.
What I want to achieve is:
Easy verification (like "user name already taken", "password confirmation doesn't match password" and stuff like that).
Easy submit and redirect
I'm new to Rails, I just know about forms verification in Django, so for Django I would probably choose option 1, but it might be another thing in Ruby.
If you want the verification to come back to the registration page, you should make it a dynamic page.
The other problem with a static page in the public directory is that your links all become hardcoded, so if you application ever lives off the domain root (i.e. example.com/app) the links in that static file could be wrong.
Additionally, if you ever need to move your images to a different host, you lose the advantages of the image_tag.
Only use static resources if you know things won't change and you need speed. If your dynamic pages are too slow, you can cache them, or you might be doing something wrong.
UPDATE: (to address the first comment)
You can't use the rails functions to build your URLs when you are in the public folder. If you need rails generated URLs in your javascript, trigger them from a rails view page.
Generally, I'll do the following:
In application.html.erb in the head tag:
<%= yield :headScripting %>
Then in the view page that is triggering the javascript:
<% content_for :headScripting do %>
jQuery().ready(function() {
jQuery("#placeholder").load("<%= summary_model_path(#model) %>");
});
<% end %>
That would load the summary text from the model controller action summary. This would probably render :text => "summary" or render :layout => false depending on your needs
Related
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.
I've been working with Ruby & RoR for a few weeks now and must say, this is a beautiful language, it's been very enjoyable to work with.
I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction for an article that explains collecting user inputs on the frontend, everything I've found so far has been confusing.
Basically, I want to create an input field in a front end view that passes the result to my controller so I can feed it to an API wrapper.
In irb I can do this, but I don't understand the equivalent for a view that's accessible on the front end.
customeremail = gets.chomp
ticketfind = Desk.customers(:email => customeremail)
I don't necessarily need to store the data in a database, I'd almost rather prefer not to. Basically just need the input to pass off to the API, so I can redirect to a form which I'll submit to the API. I'm certain I can figure it out with some good links, I just don't think I'm googling the right thing.
Thanks for reading!
What you want is a simple form on your view...
<%= form_tag "/my_controller/my_action" do %>
<%= text_field_tag ":customer_email" %>
<%= submit_tag "Save" %>
<% end %>
This site explains about form_tag
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormTagHelper.html
And in your my_controller your my_action method...
def my_action
ticketfind = Desk.customers(:email => params[:customer_email])
Unlike Josh I prefer to use form helpers, but there's always more than one way to do it.
When forms are submitted in HTML they create a POST request to the server based on the URL you pointed the form to. The server picks up the POST request and maps it to the controller via your route map.
Ex:
<!-- This will POST form data to localhost:3000/users/create -->
<form action='users/create'>
<input type='text'/>
<input type='submit'/>
</form>
This should ping your server and route to UsersController#create. Rails stashes the form data in params
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_form_action.asp
I would recommend that you learn to do this without ERB first. Create a form with raw HTML so you can start to learn what's going on. You can use an ERB template, but only embed the variables in Ruby (e.g. don't use form helpers). You can then refactor to that (I personally prefer raw HTML over ERB heleprs). If you use Chrome or FF, you can open up the developer console and watch how the network requests work when you submit the form (I forget if this clears with each refresh or not, so you might not actually be able to do this in this example, but it's helpful in AJAX flows)
StackOverflow, for example, has a user's reputation displayed up top. Clearly, this is grabbed from the database, and it's displayed on every page. Of course, this isn't in every controller action on every page, because that would be incredibly redundant.
How do you handle this kind of situation in rails? The only way I can think of it is to use before_filters to pass the models into the page, but that just seems like abuse of that feature. There seems to be the cells gem that does what I want, but I'd imagine this is a common problem and there must be a simple solution for it in rails without having to resort to plugins or gems.
What you are looking for is the layout. In rails this is where you define headers, footers, and sidebars that frame your site. Look for app/views/layouts/application.html.erb in your generated rails code. Towards the bottom you will see:
<body>
<%= yield %>
</body>
The yield is where rest of the app gets invoked. Everything before and after the yield will appear on every page. So, using your example, you might query the database and set the instance variable #reputation in the application controller:
#reputation = User.find( current_user ).reputation
then display it in the layout like this:
<body>
<%= #reputation %>
<%= yield %>
</body>
This is covered thoroughly in the book "Agile Web Development With Rails". If you are going to develop in Rails I recommend getting the latest edition.
I would just make a partial with the widget in it and render it in the layout(s) where you want it to appear. Let it do whatever it needs to do, eg connect to the db, run some js to connect to an external site, etc.
If you're concerned about optimisation then deal with it when it becomes a problem.
I guess, you can put the code you need into a view helper. And then render some partial, like it was said before, in the layouts where you want it to appear, calling helper's function.
Look here:
Rails view helpers in helper file
I am learning Ruby on Rails, and I am very confused on how the controller-model-view relationship works for my application.
What I have now is a table full of comments (posts) users have made. What I want to do is let users click on a comment to see more information in a separate panel (ie, other database fields that weren't initially shown, for example the user_id of the person who posted the comment).
In my _post.html.erb, I have something like:
<div class="post" id="<%= post.post_id %>" onclick = ?? >
<p>post.text</p></div>
What should go in onclick? I need a way for the onclick to call a helper/controller method which can load more information, and then put that in another div on a page (I've tried variations of using the controller and helper to call javascript which inserts html into the site, but that seems messier than it should be). From what I understand, I should create some kind of partial _postdetails.html.erb file that handles the actual displaying of the html, but I have no idea how to specific where that partial would go in the page.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
You can achieve what you want either by using Rails helpers or by writing the AJAX calls yourself.
Personally I manually write all my AJAX calls using jQuery.
You can also use Prototype which ships with Rails.
That being said you can do.
In your JS file :
$("div.some-class").click(function()
{
$.ajax(
{
url:"url/to/controller/action",
type:<GET>/<POST>,
data://If you wish to sent any payload
});
});
In your controller :
def some_action
#some computation
render :update do |page|
page["id_of_div_to_be_refreshed"].replace_html :partial => "some_partial"
end
end
I have several static files(pages), which are basically copies of my website pages source code, with the content changed.
These files support my website, (keeping the same format) in various ways.
For example the menu part is:-
<body>
<div id="menu">
<ul class="level1" id="root">
etc
etc. until
</ul>
</div>
Unfortunately every month or so my menu bar changes and I have to update each static file manually.
As each of my static files have the same menu.
Is it possible to have one menu file which can be updated and have the static files load them automatically.
I plan to have several more static files. So this would be a great help if someone can suggest how to accomplish this.
Oh yes. Use some javascript magic to load the menu bar upon page load and keep it in menu.html.
One solution may be to use a spider (wget --recursive) to download generated pages directly from your application. One command, and you have the full copy of your site. (just add some useful options, like --convert-links, for example).
The other option may be to write an after_filter in your controller, and write the generated content to a file (not always, but for example when you add a parameter ?refresh_copy=1). Maybe just turning on page caching would be suitable? But the problem will be that you will not be able to trigger the controller action so easily.
If you don't want the whole site copied, just add some specific routes or controllers (/mirrorable/...) and run the spider on them, or just access them manually (to trigger saving the content in the files).
I ended up creating one controller without a model.
rails g controller staticpages
I then created a layout file which imported the individual changes to the layout, via a "yield" tied to a "content_for" in the view files(static files(pages) in the "view of staticpages" (for example abbreviations, aboutthissite etc etc).
The rest of the static file loaded with the usual "yield" in the layout. Works a treat. No more updating the menu bar all done automatically.
To get to the correct static file I created a route using:-
match 'static/:static_page_name'=> 'staticpages#show' (or in rails 2.x:-
map.connect 'static/:static_page_name', :controller=> "staticpages", :action=> "show"
"static_page_name" variable accepted anything after "/static/" in the url and passed it to the controller "staticpages" in which I set up a show action containing:-
def show
#static_page_name = params[:static_page_name]
allowed_pages = %w(abbreviations aboutthissite etc, etc,)
if allowed_pages.include?(#static_page_name)
render #static_page_name
else
redirect_to '/' #redirects to homepage if link does not exists
end
end
I then only had to change the links in the website. (e.g.<%= link_to " About This Site ", '/static/aboutthissite' %>)
and viola! its all working.