Ruby w/ Sinatra: Could I have an example of a jQuery AJAX request?

Question

%a{:href => \"/new_game?human_is_first=true\", :remote => \"true\"}
            %span Yes

Above is my link. Just wondering how to handle this. I

Answer 1

See my answer to your other recent question for a comprehensive setup for sending and receiving HTML partials in a production Sinatra app.

As Sinatra is a nice lightweight framework, you are free (forced?) to come up with your own workflow and code for implementing partials and handling such calls. Instead of my explicit route-per-partial, you might choose to define a single regex-based route that looks up the correct data based on the URL or param passed.

In general, if you want Sinatra to respond to a path, you need to add a route. So:

get "/new_game" do
  # This block should return a string, either directly,
  # by calling haml(:foo), erb(:foo), or such to render a template,
  # or perhaps by calling ...to_json on some object.
end

If you want to return a partial without a layout and you're using a view, be sure to pass layout:false as an option to the helper. For example:

get "/new_game" do
  # Will render views/new_game.erb to a string
  erb :new_game, :layout => false
end

If you want to return a JSON response, you should set the appropriate header data:

get "/new_game" do
  content_type :json
  { :foo => "bar" }.to_json
end

If you really want to return raw JavaScript code from your handler and then execute that...well, here's how you return the JS:

get "/new_game" do
  content_type 'text/javascript'
  # Turns views/new_game.erb into a string
  erb :new_game, :layout => false
end

It's up to you to receive the JS and *shudder* eval() it.