Jonathan Snook, Aaron Gustafson, Stuart Langridge, and Dan Webb
"Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries"
openWith(this.href);
return false;
}
});
Here you??™re using an attribute selector to select all the
elements with a rel attribute of
help and triggering Help.openWith(), passing the link??™s href when it is clicked. As with normal
event handlers, returning false will stop the default action of the link so you don??™t get taken
off to the help page.
You??™re now ready to test it, so let??™s include application.js in the page by updating the
application layout:
<%= javascript_include_tag 'prototype', 'lowpro', 'moofx', 'application' %>
When clicking any of the help links, you should now get the help content in the sidebar??”
but you aren??™t quite there yet. At the moment, the help content comes with a whole HTML page
wrapped around it, but you just want to inject the inner content. To implement this you need to
return to the Rails help controller (app/controllers/help_controller.rb) and adjust it so that if
the page is requested via Ajax, you return the content with a different layout:
class HelpController < ApplicationController
def show
template = '/help/' + params[:path].join('/')
if request.xhr?
render :template => template, :layout => 'help_sidebar'
else
render :template => template, :layout => 'help'
end
end
end
CHAPTER 9 n A DYNAMIC HELP SYSTEM 199
You??™ve added a condition to test whether the request does come from XMLHttpRequest (a.k.a.
Ajax) and then send the same template, but with the help_sidebar layout instead.
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