[Catalyst] sane AJAX strategy

[Daniel McBrearty]

I just started using AJAX (or AHAH actually ... ) a little. I like the
lightness it gives but I've been slow to pick up because I want to be
sure that pages work without js, and I haven't figured out a generic
method yet. I'm sure others are ahead of me on this ...

Typical scenario without AJAX :

form button submits to URL, which triggers a single Cat action, which
is rendered by a single template, usually of the same name.

That's simple, just a one-to-one relationship.

When we use AJAX, things look very similar, EXCEPT that only a part of
a page is loaded.

This implies that for the non-js user of the same page, multiple
actions and templates have been combined so that the result is
identical, even though the whole page loaded.

An example:

(in the .js file)

// button foo gets an event sends query to /foo, puts result into bar

(html)

<div id="bar">Nothing selected.</div>

<form target="whole_page">
.
.
.
<input type="button" id="foo" value="Select something">

</form>

(controller)

# get a whole page
# here we need to check whether foo was a from submit or not
# if not render page with defaults
# otherwise render page using foo to fill in bar
sub whole_page :Local {



}

# select a bar
sub foo {

}

Now this will be happening a lot ... what's a nice way to organise
this without too much repetiton? Does some library code exist already?

cheers

Daniel


-- 
Daniel McBrearty
email : danielmcbrearty at gmail.com
www.engoi.com : the multi - language vocab trainer
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