I have been playing around with Scala/Lift/Comet/Ajax etc. recently. I came across a problem which boils down to this:
Summary
I want to update a specific div (by id) when a certain event occurs. If the div does not exist yet, it must be created and appended to the HTML body.
Currently I cannot get this to work when using the Lift framework.
Source File
LIFT_PROJECT/src/main/webapp/static/mouseViewTest.html:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        // <![CDATA[
        $(document).ready(function() {
            updateOrCreateMouseDiv('123', 'coords')
        });
        function updateOrCreateMouseDiv(uniqueId, coords) {
            if ($('#mouse_'+uniqueId).length == 0) {
                $('body').append('<div id=' + uniqueId + '>' + coords + '</div>');
            }
            $('#mouse_'+uniqueId).html(coords)
        }
        // ]]>
    </script>
</head>
<body></body>
</html>
The Error
If I open the above file directly in a browser (file:///LIFT_PROJECT/src/main/webapp/static/mouseViewTest.html) it works i.e. a new div is created.
But if I run it through Lift/Jetty (http://localhost:8080/static/mouseViewTest) I get the following JavaScript error:
Chrome:
Uncaught Error: NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR: DOM Exception 7
Firefox (Firebug):
An invalid or illegal string was specified" code: "12
Comparing the Sources in Browser
When comparing the page sources in the browser, I can see only one difference, namely: Lift adds the following JavaScript just before the closing </body> tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/ajax_request/liftAjax.js"></script>    
<script type="text/javascript">
// <![CDATA[
var lift_page = "F320717045475W3A";
// ]]>
</script>
Questions
Does anyone have an idea why this happens?
If I would want to move the JavaScript code into the Scala file (using Lift's JavaScript and jQuery support), what would the code look like?
Please note: When I used Jq("body") ~> JqAppend() to create new divs, it worked. I just didn't know how to check whether the div id already existed. Thats why I moved the code into the template, planning on using Lift's Call function to execute the JS function. And thats when these problems started...
Thanks!