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bootstrap-ajax

This plugin is designed to work with Twitter Bootstrap to enable declarative AJAX support.

No more writing the same 20 line $.ajax blocks of Javascript over and over again for each snippet of AJAX that you want to support. Easily extend support on the server side code for this by adding a top-level attribute to the JSON you are already returning called "html" that is the rendered content. Unlike a backbone.js approach to building a web app, bootstrap-ajax leverages server side template rendering engines to render and return HTML fragments.

Demo

There is a demo project at https://github.com/eldarion/bootstrap-ajax-demo/ which is also online at http://uk013.o1.gondor.io/

Installation

Copy the files in js/bootstrap-ajax.js and optionally vendor/spin.min.js to where you keep your web sites static media and the include them in your HTML:

<script src="/js/spin.min.js"></script>
<script src="/js/bootstrap-ajax.js"></script>

The inclusion of spin.min.js is optional.

Actions

There are currently three actions supported:

  1. a.click
  2. form.submit
  3. a.cancel

a.click

Binding to the a tag's click event where the tag has the class ajax:

<a href="/tasks/12342/done/" class="btn ajax">
    <i class="icon icon-check"></i>
    Done
</a>

In addition to the href attribute, you can add data-method="post" to change the default action from an HTTP GET to an HTTP POST.

form.submit

Convert any form to an AJAX form submission quite easily by adding ajax to the form's class attribute:

<form class="form ajax" action="/tasks/create/" method="post">...</form>

When submitting this form, any input[type=submit] or button[type=submit] will be disabled immediately, then the data in the form is serialized and sent to the server using the method that was declared in the form tag.

a.cancel

Any a tag that has a data-cancel-closest attribute defined will trigger the cancel event handler. This simply removes from the DOM any elements found using the selector defined in the data-cancel-closest attribute:

<a href="#" data-cancel-closest=".edit-form" class="btn">
    Cancel
</a>

Processing Responses

There are three data attributes looked for in the response JSON data:

  1. location
  2. html
  3. fragments

If location is found in the response JSON payload, it is expected to be a URL and the browser will be immediately redirected to that location. If, on the other hand it is not present, then the processing rules below will be processed based on what attributes are defined.

If you have a fragments hash defined, it should contain a list of key/value pairs where the keys are the selectors to content that will be replaced, and the values are the server-side rendered HTML content that will replace the elements that match the selection.

You can define both html to be processed by the declaritive rules defined below and the fragements at the same time. This gives you the ability to for example replace the form you submited with html content while at the same time updating multiple bits of content on the page without having to refresh them.

There are five different ways that you can declare an html response without a location directive be processed:

  1. Append
  2. Refresh
  3. Refresh Closest
  4. Replace
  5. Replace Closest

Here is where it can get fun as all of the values for these processing directives are just CSS selectors. In addition they can be multiplexed. You can declare all of them at the same time if you so desire. A CSS selector can easily be written to address multiple different blocks on the page at the same time.

Best to just see some examples.

Append

Using data-append allows you to specify that the data.html returned in the server response's JSON be appended to the elements found in the specified CSS selector:

<a href="/tasks/12342/done/" class="btn ajax" data-method="post"
                                              data-append=".done-list">
    <i class="icon icon-check"></i>
    Done
</a>

Refresh

Using the data-refresh attribute let's you define what elements, if selected by the CSS selector specified for it's value, get refreshed. Elements that are selected will get refreshed with the contents of the url defined in their data-refresh-url attribute:

<div class="done-score" data-refresh-url="/users/paltman/done-score/">...</div>

<div class="done-list">...</div>

<a href="/tasks/12342/done/" class="btn ajax" data-method="post"
                                              data-append=".done-list"
                                              data-refresh=".done-score">
    <i class="icon icon-check"></i>
    Done
</a>

In this example, the .done-list will be appended to with the data.html returns from the AJAX post made as a result of clicking the button and simultaneously, the .done-score will refresh itself by fetching (GET) JSON from the url defined in data-refresh-url and replacing itself with the contents of data.html that is returned.

Refresh Closest

This works very much in the same way as data-refresh however, the uses jQuery's closest method to interpret the selector.

Replace

Sometimes you want to neither refresh nor append to existing elements but you want to just replace the content with whatever it is that is returned from the server. This is what data-replace is for.

Replace Closest

This works very much in the same way as data-replace however, the uses jQuery's closest method to interpret the selector.

<div class="done-score" data-refresh-url="/users/paltman/done-score/">...</div>

<div class="done-list">...</div>

<div class="results"></div>

<a href="/tasks/12342/done/" class="btn ajax" data-method="post"
                                              data-append=".done-list"
                                              data-refresh=".done-score"
                                              data-replace=".results">
    <i class="icon icon-check"></i>
    Done
</a>

It is rare that you'll add/use all of these processing methods combined like this. Usually it will just be one or the other, however, I add them all here to illustrate the point that they are independently interpreted and executed.

Spinner

This is an optional include and provides support to show an activity spinner during the life of the callback.

You can specify where the spinner should be placed (it defaults to the a.click or form.submit in question) by declaring data-spinner with a CSS selector. You can turn it off all together by simply specifying off as the value instead of a selector.

Commercial Support

This project, and others like it, have been built in support of many of Eldarion's own sites, and sites of our clients. We would love to help you on your next project so get in touch by dropping us a note at [email protected].