Rails best practice regarding controller/view specific javascript

Question

With Rails 3+ and the asset pipeline my understanding is that all the javascript files under assets/javascripts get automatically included and compiled into one js file if you specify

require_tree .

in application.js.

What is the best practice regarding dealing with javascript that is specific to a controller/view? For example suppose I have a controller/view 'Houses' and I want to validate the houses form using the jquery form validation plugin, to do that I have placed the following code in my houses.js file

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("#new_house_form").validate();
});

which is fine but the problem is that when I visit another page (say /owners), it tries to validate the houses form and I get an error message in the javascript console. Ofcourse I could just check if the form exists on the current page or not and only then call the validator but that seems a little unclean to me esp if I have a lot of controller specific code in .ready.

My solution to work around this has been to create a folder assets/javascripts/global and in application.js

 require_tree ./global //instead of require_tree .

and move all the other js files except for houses.js in it. Then I manually include houses.js whenever the user accesses /houses/new or /houses/edit

Is this practice acceptable? If not what is considered to be the best practice to deal with these situations?

Great solution here: stackoverflow.com/questions/7312465/… — agmin
– agmin, Commented Oct 17, 2012 at 18:15

André Barbosa · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-17 18:48:12Z

0

Usually I just let all the js get loaded and check if the element exists before calling any method on it.

$(document).ready(function(){
  if($("#new_house_form").length > 0){
    $("#new_house_form").validate();
  }
});

answered Oct 17, 2012 at 18:48

André Barbosa

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2 Comments

4-8-15-16-23-42 Over a year ago

The problem with this is that if you have a lot of controller/view specific code (not just for forms) in your javascript then you are doing a lot of this kind of error checking. It's fine for the odd validation here and there but it gets pretty ugly as your javascript grows. I was hoping there would be a cleaner way to deal with this than manual error checks or the method I described in the question.

André Barbosa Over a year ago

Yes, it's true that with this method you'll have a lot of error checking in your javascript. It's a quick fix for you problem. If you want a cleaner solution check the link that @agmin posted on his comment. Looks like a nice solution.

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