I need a mouse over or click event to generate a simple pop up window
(an
“alert”, a “tool tip”, a “dialog”, etc.) displaying the full contents of
the car.description field.
I’m an admitted JS rookie. All the JS-Rails tutorials/information that
I’m
seeing are focused on unobtrusive JS, focused mostly on AJAX/remote
server
interactions. I’m not seeing anything that helps understand how you can
use data from your Rails application in rich JS UI features within your
views. I saw a tool tip gem, but with that gem, tool tip content is
statically generated, and tool tips are held in their own table. No way
to
generate a tool tip on the fly, based on a field pulled from the
database.
Is there some very, very simple way to have JS pop up the text held in a
Rails field?
I need a mouse over or click event to generate a simple pop up window (an
“alert”, a “tool tip”, a “dialog”, etc.) displaying the full contents of the
car.description field.
I’m an admitted JS rookie. All the JS-Rails tutorials/information that I’m
seeing are focused on unobtrusive JS, focused mostly on AJAX/remote server
interactions. I’m not seeing anything that helps understand how you can use data
from your Rails application in rich JS UI features within your views. I saw a
tool tip gem, but with that gem, tool tip content is statically generated, and
tool tips are held in their own table. No way to generate a tool tip on the fly,
based on a field pulled from the database.
Is there some very, very simple way to have JS pop up the text held in a Rails
field?
If you use the Title attribute on the shortened example, you could get a
poor-man’s popup for free:
Then you could layer over that some JavaScript to pull the title content
into a rich popup if you like. But all alone, this will give you an
accessible solution with minimal code. If you added some CSS to the
.more class, you could change the cursor on mouseover to clue the user,
or add some color or underline to make it really apparent.
On Sunday, February 19, 2012 5:15:11 AM UTC-7, JavierQQ wrote:
Is there some very, very simple way to have JS pop up the text held in a
Rails field?
What about fancybox? fancybox.net
I use it for simple pop-up’s
Javier Q
Javier - Thanks for the suggestion on fancy box.net. Unfortunately, for
me
the challenge is that I do not understand the simple basics of how to
use a
JS library in my view. I understand that I need to load the JS library
into my rails app by adding the library to: app/assets/javascripts/
application.js , but once it is there, how do I access the library’s
functions from within my view? Could you please post a snippet of
html.erb
code that shows how you’ve accessed a fancybox function in one of your
views? Sorry to be asking what I know must be a very basic question,
but I
just can’t seem to find this documented anywhere.
Don
You can add libraries to the application.html.erb outer template by
defining content_for :head with the link, or you can simply apply that
library to every page (it’s a toss-up whether having it cached will be
faster in the long run than loading the library on only the pages you
need it)
If this is the only view where you need this functionality, then you can
simply add the JavaScript to call that library directly into your view,
below the part of the HTML where you define the elements you’re
affecting. If you were to carry my example forward, and you were using
Prototype (I don’t know the jQuery equivalent off-hand), you could do
the following:
< your table or list of elements here >
Add some css to make this a proper ‘dim out the page’ overlay, and
you’re done. Or simply style it as a popup. That part is entirely up to
how you want it to appear. If you wanted to kill the mouseover effect of
showing the title as a browser tooltip, you could do a setup as the page
loads to shuffle the title value off to a private variable on the span,
and update your click observer appropriately.
$$(‘span.more’).each(function(elm){
elm.store(‘popup’,elm.readAttribute(‘title’);
elm.writeAttribute(‘title’,null);
});
document.observe(‘click’,function(evt){
var elm;
if (elm = evt.findElement(‘span.more’)){
$(‘message’).update(elm.retrieve(‘popup’));
$(‘overlay’).show();
}else if(elm = evt.findElement(’#overlay’)){
elm.hide();
}
});
The benefit to this layered approach is that you don’t hide anything
from screen readers or Google.
Wow! Walter, thank you so much for taking the time to put all this
together for me.
I’ve looked it over, and although my JS skills are meager at best, I
believe I see the mechanism now. This is the piece of your code that
helped me see the bridge between JS and my model data, namely ‘title’ :
if (elm = evt.findElement(‘span.more’)){
$(‘message’).update(elm.readAttribute(‘title’));
$(‘overlay’).show();
}else if(elm = evt.findElement(’#overlay’)){
elm.hide();
}
I don’t think I would have got it without seeing this code segment tied
into my example. Thanks again. Very, very much appreciated.
On Sunday, February 19, 2012 10:00:00 AM UTC-7, Walter Lee D. wrote:
(an “alert”, a “tool tip”, a “dialog”, etc.) displaying the full contents
Then you could layer over that some JavaScript to pull the title content
into a rich popup if you like. But all alone, this will give you an
accessible solution with minimal code. If you added some CSS to the .more
class, you could change the cursor on mouseover to clue the user, or add
some color or underline to make it really apparent.
Walter
Walter - this is a perfect work-around; thanks for the great idea. I’ll
use it in the short term, until I can figure out my real issue. There
is
something very basic that I’m not getting/finding. How do I access JS
libraries for enhancing my UI from within a html.erb view? If you can
point me to any resources or code examples that would be great.