CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jqueryruby-on-railsajax
Krease
Krease

Reputation: 16215

How to asynchronously load a partial page in rails

In creating a ruby on rails / jquery app, there's a part of a page that is time-consuming to generate.

I want to change how the page is loaded so that most of the page loads right away, and a placeholder is reserved for the time-consuming part to load asynchronously, and be injected into the page with ajax / jquery when it is finished.

What I have now (simplified):

app/views/sample/show.html.erb: 

<div id="theResult">
    <%= render :partial => 'calculate', :object => @org) %>
</div>

and the partial will use some parts @org to generate some content (hitting another external REST service).

app/views/sample/_calculate.html.erb

<%
    # code to take org and turn it into content
%>
<!--...html to display results here -->

I realize this is probably breaking proper MVC architecture rules since my partial seems to have too much logic, and would like to clean that up as well...

So I guess I have two questions in one: (1) how do I get this to work, and (2) how should I clean this up to follow good ruby/rails/mvc practices?

Upvotes: 46

Views: 26533

Answers (2)

justingordon
justingordon

Reputation: 12893

There's a simpler way to do it compared to @cailinanne.

Using her same example, but I tend to use this technique to update a div, so my div would first have that partial:

<div id="pink-dancing-elephants">
   <%= render "elephants/dancing", elephant: some_thing  %>
</div>

But then use the jQuery load method:

$("#pink-dancing-elephants").load("/elephants/dancing");

This will return the whole partial. Be sure to use layout: false, and optionally set params. I tend to use a partial like this

# elephants_controller.rb
def dancing
  render "elephants/_dancing", 
         locals: { elephant: some_thing },
         layout: false
end

This would render the template in views/elephants/_dancing.html.erb.

NOTE the underscore in the partial name for the controller method and how you don't use it when calling render in the view.

Upvotes: 10

cailinanne
cailinanne

Reputation: 8372

First put an empty, placeholder div in the main response

<div id="pink-dancing-elephants"></div>

and then add a little jQuery to the page

$.ajax({
    url: "/elephants/dancing",
    cache: false,
    success: function(html){
      $("#pink-dancing-elephants").append(html);
    }
});

and have the action that responses to /elephants/dancing/pink return the blob of HTML that you want to have fill up the div. In the action that is invoked by the AJAX request, you'll want to render with :layout => false to keep the returned blob of HTML from including the entire frame. E.g.

# elephants_controller.rb
def dancing
  @elephants = #whatever
  render :layout => false
end

This would render the template in views/elephants/dancing.html.erb.

Upvotes: 72

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