Ruby on Rails ajax - dynamically loading all pages

Question

I have a flash media player (similar to lala.com) that needs to continue to stream while people click around. I don't want to use an iframe.

So, I need to dynamically load all site pages with ajax no matter what link people click on.

I've got this working with Rails and JQuery for a single page. With this method I have to place a file.js.erb file for whatever controller is called. Example: example.com/home is called and I have to have an index.js.erb in the views home dir to respond to this.

I used: http://railscasts.com/episodes/174-pagination-with-ajax

to get this to work on one page, but it wouldn't be DRY at all to copy .js.erb files to every controller.

Is there something I can do with the main application_controller or even with routes.rb?

Answer 1

This is really going to impact your visibility to search engines. I also think it will mean you need to think about the flow of your controllers. Rather than having controllers responding with views that represent a page, controllers will respond with snippets of HTML/JSON/etc that get injected into the home page. Your home page acts as a coordinator, loading the content in and out. Perfectly fine to have js.erb files in each view folder ... as they should be returning content specific to an individual controller.

Answer 2

I found a way to do this. You can load whatever pages you want via the jquery load method.

$('#result').load('ajax/test.html #container');

They will then be placed in the div with the #result id. You can also specify a page fragment with #container so you only load the part you want. This allows all your controllers to stay in tact etc with no extra js.