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jqueryruby-on-railsunobtrusive-javascript

Unobtrusive jQuery autocomplete in Rails

I'm using rails, but doing all my Javascript unobtrusively using jQuery in application.js.

Unfortunately, this makes it quite difficult to reference URLs. For example, if I want to give a field autocomplete behavior, I have to hard-code the autocomplete URL in application.js since the rails url_for isn't available.

Is it possible to make application.js use erb? Am I thinking about this the wrong way?

Solution

  • You could add the url to an attribute on the form or form field, if you don't mind markup that may not pass the validator, and then fetch that attribute with jQuery.

    It looks like Rails 3.0 might be going down this route with the javascript helpers using HTML5 custom data attributes: DHH @ Railsconf 09