Complete noob Jquery / Rails setup question (probably)

Question

Background: I've been doing RoR for about a year now, and am fairly comfortable with it, however, I know next to nothing about Javascript.

I've been playing around with some jquery autocomplete stuff in my rails app. I pretty much had a version working, but needed some tokenized fields too for a one to many relationship.

Right on cue - good old Ryan Bates does a railscast on it. So I start following the instructions.

Got a little bit nervous when I had to start installing 'jquery-rails' gem (I'd already installed jrails to get the other stuff working).

As suspected, it broke some stuff but I managed to get that working again.

Anyway, I got most of the way through the tutorial, and everything was going fine - I've got the tokenizer script to find the correct input field and it acts as expected. I've tested the json link too - that sends back all the right stuff.

However when I start typing in the text field - nothing happens, and when I view the console window it comes back with:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'replace' of undefined
  jQuery.jQuery.extend._Deferred.deferred.resolveWith
  done
  jQuery.ajaxTransport.send.callback

I can make guesses as to why this is going wrong - but any expert advice would be greatly appreciated.

(I should also add - I'm using formtastic too)

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Ok, finally figured it out.

It turns out that my author's name column is not name but rather author. So I needed to make a change inside the js.coffee script to override that default search of name.

The line you need to use is:

propertyToSearch: "author"

My whole book.js.coffee file now looks like this:

jQuery ->
  $('#book_author_tokens').tokenInput '/authors.json'
    theme: 'mac'
    prePopulate: $('#book_author_tokens').data('load')
    propertyToSearch: "author"

This actually fixed the error Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'replace' of undefined

Of course, if you do use a different column name you will want to also edit the functions in the author.rb file to reflect that:

def self.tokens(query)
      authors = where("author like ?", "%#{query}%")
      if authors.empty?
        [{id: "<<<#{query}>>>", author: "New: \"#{query}\""}]
      else
        authors
      end
    end

    def self.ids_from_tokens(tokens)
      tokens.gsub!(/<<<(.+?)>>>/) { create!(author: $1).id }
      tokens.split(',')
    end

Edit

Another thing I had to do for the fieldsto be prepopulated with the existing authors was change this:

= f.input :author_tokens, :data => { :load => @book.author }

To this:

= f.input :author_tokens, :input_html => { :data => { :load => @book.author } }

And then they would show up.

Hope this helps you.