Rails - display results of index and show actions via ajax

Question

I have a very simple Post resource with two actions, index and show. My template contains a sidebar with links to each previous post. I want the sidebar links to displa

Answer 1

Got this working, it was very simple in the end.

Step 1 - add :remote => true to links in sidebar

#application.html.haml
%nav#sidebar
  - for post in @posts
    = link_to post.title, post_path, :remote => true
%div#main
    = yield

Step 2 - tell your controller to respond to JS on the show action

def show
  @post = Post.find(params[:id])
  @posts=Post.all # needed for sidebar, probably better to use a cell for this
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html # show.html.erb
    format.js # show.js.erb
  end
end

Step 3 - Create _post.html.haml

# _post.html.haml
%article.post
  = sanitize post.body

Step 4 - Create show.js.erb and replace the html in the #main div with the contents of the _post partial (that we created in step 3)

# show.js.erb
$("#main").html("<%= escape_javascript(render @post) %>");

Now all the content is passed via ajax and it's working fine.