Using will_paginate with AJAX live search with jQuery in Rails

Question

I am using will_paginate to successfully page through records. I am also using AJAX live search via jQuery to update my results div. No problem so far. The issue I have is when trying to paginate through those live search results. I simply get "Page is loading..." with no div update. Am I missing something fundamental? I believe I may need to somehow bind the pagination links' click event via jQuery as well.

# index.html.erb

  <form id="searchform" accept-charset="utf-8" method="get" action="/search">
    Search: <input id="search" name="search" type="text" autocomplete="off" title="Search location, company, description..." />      
   <%= image_tag("spinner.gif", :id => "spinner", :style =>"display: none;" ) %>  
  </form>

# JobsController#search

def search
    if params[:search].nil?
      @jobs = Job.paginate :page => params[:page], :order => "created_at desc"
    elsif params[:search] and request.xhr?
      @jobs = Job.search params[:search], params[:page]
    end
    render :partial => "jobs", :layout => false, :locals => { :jobs => @jobs }
  end

# Job#search

def self.search(search, page)
    logger.debug "Job.paginate #{search}, #{page}"
    paginate :per_page => @@per_page, :page => page,
             :conditions => ["description LIKE ? or title LIKE ? or company LIKE ?", 
               "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%", "%#{search}%"], 
               :order => 'created_at DESC'
  end

# search.js

$(document).ready(function(){

  $("#search").keyup(function() {
    $("#spinner").show(); // show the spinner
    var form = $(this).parents("form"); // grab the form wrapping the search bar.
    var url = form.attr("action"); // grab the URL from the form's action value.
    var formData = form.serialize(); // grab the data in the form
    $.get(url, formData, function(html) { // perform an AJAX get, the trailing function is what happens on successful get.
      $("#spinner").hide(); // hide the spinner
      $("#jobs").html(html); // replace the "results" div with the result of action taken
    });
  });

});

Answer 1

If the spinner never gets hidden, most likely the request to /search has failed - check your log/development.log. It looks like you might want to default the :page parameter if it is not provided:

page = params[:page] || 1