RJS Templates

I love RJS. It means I don't have to wade through Javascript (yeuch). But RJS templates have been bothering me for a while. You see your .rhtml and your .mab files literally are views. They define HTML as it appears on-screen. But your .rjs files are not. They manipulate what is there but they do not define it. The proof of this is when you find yourself writing:

page.replace_html 'something', :partial => 'something', :object => @something

The RJS defines what you want to happen to the page but what actually gets displayed is in _something.mab (or _something.rhtml).

So I have decided to do the following from now on: no more .rjs "views" - instead I will code my controllers like this:

def new
  @something = Something.new
  respond_to do | format |
    format.js { render_new_as_js }
  end
end

private

def render_new_as_js
  render :update do | page |
    page.replace_html 'something', :partial => 'something', :object => @something
    page.visual_effect :highlight, 'something'
  end
end 

In other words code stays in the controller and html stays in the views.