Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

Bruce Williams is right on in Avoiding AJAX Faux Pas where he lists four inviolable conditions your AJAX code must meet. The first two conditions address the need to show (then hide) a visual progress indicator to let the user know that a network operation (XHR) is occurring. These are important rules. Unfortunately, the implementation he presents is fraught with difficulties.

Bruce’s solution is comprised of a Ruby function showing_progress which he suggests you use in every single call to (insert_html, replace_html, replace) to wrap any options you’d normally pass to those routines. The showing_progress routine adds :loading and :complete handlers that will show, then hide an element with id ‘progress’ on your page.

The solution is kind of elegant and it works as advertised but I ran into a few problems as I got deeper into my app:

1. I forgot to call showing_progress in new invocations of insert_html, replace_html, replace — as a result I didn’t get progress indication in those cases
2. The solution works only for Ruby RJS code — if you write JavaScript that calls Ajax.Request and Ajax.Updater then the solution of course doesn’t help.
3. The solution ruthlessly overwrites any :loading and :complete handlers you’ve defined in your options

How about a solution that works for both Ruby and JavaScript? It’d be nice if it didn’t rely on the programmer remembering to call it everywhere? It’d be even nicer if it didn’t interfere with your application’s :loading and :complete handlers.

Here’s the solution I’m using. I don’t recall where I first saw it but I’m pretty sure I didn’t invent it. I see Nicky Peeters was suggesting a similar thing over a year ago. Just put this code in application.js:

    1 Ajax.Responders.register({
    2 onCreate: function() {
    3  if($(‘progress‘) && Ajax.activeRequestCount>0)
    4  Effect.Appear(‘progress‘,{duration:0.5,queue:‘end‘});
    5 },
    6
    7 onComplete: function() {
    8  if($(‘progress‘) && Ajax.activeRequestCount==0)
    9  Effect.Fade(‘progress‘,{duration:0.5,queue:‘end‘});
   10 }
   11 });

And stick something like this in your layout:

    1                 <span id=‘progress‘ style=‘display:none;‘>
    2                     <img src=‘/images/busy.gif‘>
    3                 </span>

And you’ll have one less worry in your life.

As explanations go, it doesn’t get much more straightforward than Cody Fauser’s excellent post on Rails RJS Templates. When you try it out though, you may notice that TextMate doesn’t know that RJS templates which by convention have an “.rjs” suffix, are really Ruby code. If you want to make TextMate aware of the “.rjs” suffix simply open the Bundle Editor window, navigate to the Ruby bundle, scroll down to the Ruby language definition (it has a Gray circular icon with an “L” on it), and add ‘rjs’ to the list of fileTypes.

Once you do that, TextMate will treat .rjs files like other Ruby files and you’ll get syntax highlighting and stuff.