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I was under the impression that you could put javascript in a view template in Rails 3. For example, if I had this html in views/public/home.html.erb

<div id="block">click</div>

then in views/public/home.js.erb, I thought I could put the following javascript, and then click on html to trigger the javascript. However, when I tested it, I got no results. But if I put the javascript in assets/javascript/application.js, then everything worked fine...Shouldn't it also work if it was in a js template with the same name as the html view?

$(document).ready(function(){       

test(); 
}); 


function test() {

    $("#block").click(function() { 

         $('#block').hide();

       });

 }
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3 Answers 3

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Ummm. no. It just doesn't work that way. Only one of views/public/home.* will be rendered, depending on the responds type.

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2 Comments

but at the same time, for Ajax to work without a page refresh, doesn't javascript have to be in a view?
The javascript is included via assets, or as a <script> tag in the view being rendered... the ajax call chain is then in a second request. An ajax method calls the server, which responds appropriately depending on the call type - the ajax call may respond with a js.erb template, or json, or xml...
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Javascript shouldn't be added as a view file (bla.js.erb). They must be put in assets/javascripts or at least in lib or vendor directory.

You must also require them in your application.js file, if you already don't use require_tree.

In this way you won't need to reference the javascript in any way in your view (the application.js will include it for you). Otherwise, you need to specify a layout to insert javascript files in block, because views are rendered after tag.

There are a lot of reason not to put javascript directly in html (except for tests obviusly), read the rails asset pipeline for more information.

When you create a view with a different extension from html.erb that will be used only if your url specify a format with that extension, for example mywebsite/users.json will return eventually a index.json.erb.

For AJAX you would like to return a JSON object, not javascript which is definitely not a correct approach. Remember that you are using a framework and you should follow it's guidelines. If you want to live it's rails, it will be hard to work with it.

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4 Comments

o.k, thanks. Actually, I just checked a book I'm reading and they have a file called remove.js.erb in public/views/tags and there's a function called "remove" in the Tags controller. They do this apparently so the ajax will change the presentation without a page refresh...
having it in public/views/tags is different, that's not a view but just a place where you can put things always visibles. If you want really to call with ajax a javascript file which is a view, remember that you should append .js to your link if the view is myview.js.erb. For example: mywebsite/users.js
o.k., thanks for explaining. Very appreciative of any help you can give. Cheers.
No problem, I'm learning rails too and worked a bit with formats so I understood this part quite well. If you need any other help, just ask ;)
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You can use javascript_include_tag

If you have the js files source1.js, source2.js in public/javascript then you can include them using 

javascript_include_tag 'source1', 'source2'
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