jQuery UI Dialog instead of alert() for Rails 3 data-confirm attribute

Question

In Rails 3, passing a :confirm parameter to link_to will populate the data-confirm attribute of the link. This will induce a JS alert() when the link is clicked.

I am using the rails jQuery UJS adapter (https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs). The relevant code from rails.js is:

$('body').delegate('a[data-confirm], button[data-confirm], input[data-confirm]', 'click.rails', function () {
    var el = $(this);
    if (el.triggerAndReturn('confirm')) {
        if (!confirm(el.attr('data-confirm'))) {
            return false;
        }
    }
});

and

triggerAndReturn: function (name, data) {
        var event = new $.Event(name);
        this.trigger(event, data);

        return event.result !== false;
    }

I would like to know how this could be modified to instead yield a jQuery dialog (e.g. the jQuery UI Dialog) allowing the user to confirm or cancel.

My knowledge of JavaScript isn't sufficient to achieve this elegantly. My current approach would be to simply rewrite the $('body').delegate() function to instead instantiate a lightbox. However I imagine that there is a more effective approach than this.

Answer 1

I just added an external API to the Rails jquery-ujs for exactly this kind of customization. You can now make rails.js use a custom confirm dialog by plugging into (and re-writing 1 line of) the $.rails.allowAction function.

See my article, Rails jQuery UJS: Now Interactive, for a full explanation with examples.

EDIT: As of this commit, I moved the confirm dialog function to the $.rails object, so that it can be modified or swapped out even more easily now. E.g.

$.rails.confirm = function(message) { return myConfirmDialog(message); };