I've a question about best practices in javascript.
I've a dropdown menu with some statuts. If the statut is : external, I want to display a form. I don't know the best way to do this. Do i need to hide a DIV from the DOM and display him when i need it or do i need to generate my form dynamically in jquery and make a call ajax to populate some data.
It really depends on your application. If you already have a lot of elements in the DOM, and the likelyhood of actually needing to show this form is low, you may want to add it later (using ajax) because in most cases you don't need it anyway. However, if your DOM load is light, and in most cases the form will be shown, you make want to have it ready and hidden so that is can be quickly shown.
There is also a middle ground where you can "lazy load" it (using javascript on page load), and keep it in a json object until it is ready to be used. This will keep your DOM responsive, and give the added benefit of a quicker load of the form.
it depends on the probability of user clicking on that element and number of elements already present in the DOM. I suggest to create form runtime whenever user performs action instead of hiding it. There are some browser plugins which shows all hidden elements in a page.
Unless your page is unusually large already or there are a lot of different forms like this that could be used from the same page, putting the HTML into the page and just starting out with it hidden gives you the advantage that all your markup is in one place (in the HTML file that represents your page) and can more easily be centrally maintained that way.
When you start putting markup into your javascript, you split up the maintenance of the markup between both the HTML of the page and the HTML that is embedded into your page.
If, on the other hand, you had a lot of these forms that were all slightly different that could all be used from the same page, then it gets messy to pre-specify all possible combinations of the form in the original HTML and you would probably be better off dynamically generating it via javascript or perhaps generating it from a template with slight modifications.
