Submit Not Triggering Appropriate Accept Headers Using form_remote_tag

Question

The form_remote_tag seems to generate the correct html, but format.html is rendered instead of format.js. The two most common answers to format.html being rendered instead of format.js are renaming the file *.rjs to *.js.rjs and making sure the the javascript files are actually loaded. Both of these have been done. Let me know if there's any other information I can provide.

[edit] create.js.rjs has been added below. [/edit]

Rails 2.3.2

view/projects/show.html.erb

<%= form_remote_tag :url => { :controller => :milestones, :action => :create }
    #:update => 'milestone-list',
    #:url => { :controller => "milestones", :action => :ajax_create},
    #:position => 'bottom'
%>

<%= render :partial => 'milestones/form' %>
<input type="hidden" id="milestone_project_id" name="milestone[project_id]" value="<%[email protected] %>" />

<%= submit_tag 'Add Milestone' %>

milestones_controller.rb

def create
 @milestone = Milestone.new(params[:milestone])

 respond_to do |format|
    if @milestone.save
        flash[:notice] = 'Milestone was successfully created.'
        format.js   {render :layout => false }
        format.html { render :show }#redirect_to(@milestone) }
        format.xml  { render :xml => @milestone, :status => :created, :location => @milestone }
    else
        format.html { render :action => "new" }
        format.xml  { render :xml => @milestone.errors, :status => :unprocessable_entity }
    end
 end
end

headers

(domain names and ips have been changed. The server is mongrel with apache setup as proxy)

*  ACCEPT: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
* HOST: 127.0.0.1:8004
* X_FORWARDED_HOST: slate.project.mydevserver.com
* VIA: 1.1 project.mydevserver.com
* USER_AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6
* ACCEPT_LANGUAGE: en-us,en;q=0.5
* REFERER: http://slate.project.mydevserver.com/projects/2
* VERSION: HTTP/1.1
* X_FORWARDED_SERVER: project.mydevserver.com
* X_FORWARDED_FOR: 1.2.3.4
* ACCEPT_CHARSET: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
* CONNECTION: Keep-Alive
* ACCEPT_ENCODING: gzip,deflate

generated html

<form action="/milestones" method="post" onsubmit="new Ajax.Request('/milestones', {asynchronous:true, evalScripts:true, parameters:Form.serialize(this)}); return false;">
<div style="margin:0;padding:0"><input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="wTS9QPqFiGvP3RVlvKsA49Z6xtEGH9gmcLP//XC0whc=" /></div>

Title: <input id="milestone_title" name="milestone[title]" size="30" type="text" /><br />
Description: <input id="milestone_description" name="milestone[description]" size="30" type="text" /><br />
Days: <input id="milestone_days" name="milestone[days]" size="30" type="text" /><br />

<input type="hidden" id="milestone_project_id" name="milestone[project_id]" value="2" />

<input name="commit" type="submit" value="Add Milestone" />
</form>

create.js.rjs

page.insert_html :bottom, 'milestone_list', "Hi"

Answer 1

Any chance you've got Javascript disabled in the browser you're testing from? That would explain your results.

Answer 2

Have you tried removing the {render :layout => false } block from format.js and just doing something like

...
...
format.js
format.html { render :show }#redirect_to(@milestone) }
...

To my understanding RJS does not deal with layouts as it does not yield within them, I could be wrong about that though. But I personally have never actually used a :layout option on my js responses before.

Also, your render call is missing "what" to render. Like...

render :js => "alert('this is javascript')"
render :action => "some_action"
render :xml => ....

Answer 3

You can easily check if your code is fine by forcing the format to be javascript with adding :format => :js to the url hash. It will explicitly add the format to the url and thus force the javascript to be rendered, but it will break the graceful degrading for javascript-disabled browser. If you want to keep that feature - I believe you should look into your proxy (apache) config, as it was said above - apparently it's messing with your headers.

Try to capture the request when it's send by your browser (with Firebug or LiveHTTPHeaders for Firefox) and compare it with the one you see on the server side, I believe you'll see that there lies your problem.

Answer 4

One idea is that you can rewrite your create action in your controller to include a test to see if the request is a XHR (this is detailed further on in the docs), here's a simplified version:

def create

  @milestone = Milestone.new(params[:milestone])

  if @milestone.save
    if request.xhr?
      render :update do |page|
        page.insert_html :bottom, 'milestone_list', "Hi"
      end
    else
      respond_to do |format|
        flash[:notice] = "Milestone saved"
        format.html
      end
    end
  else
    respond_to do |format|
      flash[:error] = "There was a problem saving the milestone"
      format.html { render :action => :new }
    end
  end

end

That could stand some DRYing up, but you should get the idea.

Answer 5

If you run rake:routes, does the route you're using end in (.:format) ?