Helper Methods for render :update do |page|

@aneiro showed me this the other day and I just got it to work. So here’s what’s up.

Instead of having a metric crap-ton of rjs files I just started doing render :update do |page| in my controllers. This lets you do, as some people complain, javascript view logic in your controller. So I ended up with three actions that each call the same set of JS. Hide that thing, replace this div with a partial, show some stuff, fade some things, change the css class of that table row, etc…

So what you can do is this: define a method in your controller and put all the page.replace_html and page.hide calls in it. Do it. Ok so then in your render :update block you just call that method and pass page to it.

One caveat is you have to actually define your new method as a helper method, which is super easy. Just call, in your controller, helper_method .

Check out the gist: http://gist.github.com/61454