Using Rails 3.1, where do you put your “page specific” JavaScript code?

Question

To my understanding, all of your JavaScript gets merged into 1 file. Rails does this by default when it adds //= require_tree . to the bottom of your appl

Answer 1

For the page-specific js you can use Garber-Irish solution.

So your Rails javascripts folder might look like this for two controllers - cars and users:

javascripts/
├── application.js
├── init.js
├── markup_based_js_execution
├── cars
│   ├── init .js
│   ├── index.js
│   └── ...
└── users
    └── ...

And javascripts will look like this:

// application.js

//= 
//= require init.js
//= require_tree cars
//= require_tree users

---

// init.js

SITENAME = new Object();
SITENAME.cars = new Object;
SITENAME.users = new Object;

SITENAME.common.init = function (){
  // Your js code for all pages here
}

---

// cars/init.js

SITENAME.cars.init = function (){
  // Your js code for the cars controller here
}

---

// cars/index.js

SITENAME.cars.index = function (){
  // Your js code for the index method of the cars controller
}

and markup_based_js_execution will contain code for UTIL object, and on DOM-ready UTIL.init execution.

And don't forget to put this to your layout file:

I also think that it is better to use classes instead of data-* attributes, for the better page-specific css. As Jason Garber have mentioned: page-specific CSS selectors can get really awkward (when you use data-*attributes)

I hope this will help you.