While I would love to be using E4X, it isn't viable yet. So JSON it is. Here is how I got a simple JSON example working with Ruby on Rails over Ajax
[1].
I'll assume you have a Rails project up and running with at least one model, controller, views etc.
First you want to install
the JSON gem;
gem install ruby-jsonThen go into your model's code and put in the following require;
require 'json/objects'. While still in the model add a
to_json method with the following code:
result = Hash.new
self.class.content_columns.each do |column|
result[column.name.to_sym] = self.send(column.name)
end
result.to_json
Now off to the controller file you go. For this daft example I create the following method:
def jsonbit
@link = Link.find(params[:id])
@headers["Content-Type"] = "text/plain; charset=utf-8"
render_text @link.to_json
end
Then in your view you want to use prototype to fire off an Ajax call e.g.
<%= remote_function(:complete => "var x = eval('(' + request.responseText + ')'); alert(x.title);", :url => { :action => :jsonbit, :id => link.id }) %>So in that what we do is fire off a call to the
jsonbit method with a model id and it returns JSON which is evaluated by JavaScript and one of the properties is alerted out.
Naturally you can return a collection of data and then loop through it using JavaScript too.
[1] Technically it should be Ajaj (Asynchronous JavaScript and JSON.) But really, nobody cares. So Ajax it is.
