To my understanding, all of your JavaScript gets merged into 1 file. Rails does this by default when it adds //= require_tree .
to the bottom of your application.js
manifest file.
This sounds like a real life-saver, but I am a little concerned about page-specific JavaScript code. Does this code get executed on every page? The last thing I want is for all of my objects to be instantiated for every page when they are only needed on 1 page.
Also, isn't there potential for code that clashes too?
Or do you put a small script
tag at the bottom of the page that just calls into a method that executes the javascript code for the page?
Do you no longer need require.js then?
Thanks
EDIT: I appreciate all the answers... and I don't think they are really getting at the problem. Some of them are about styling and don't seem to relate... and others just mention javascript_include_tag
... which I know exists (obviously...) but it would appear that the Rails 3.1 way going forward is to wrap up all of your JavaScript into 1 file rather than loading individual JavaScript at the bottom of each page.
The best solution I can come up with is to wrap certain features in div
tags with id
s or class
es. In the JavaScript code, you just check if the id
or class
is on the page, and if it is, you run the JavaScript code that is associated with it. This way if the dynamic element is not on the page, the JavaScript code doesn't run - even though it's been included in the massive application.js
file packaged by Sprockets.
My above solution has the benefit that if a search box is included on 8 of the 100 pages, it will run on only those 8 pages. You also won't have to include the same code on 8 of the pages on the site. In fact, you'll never have to include manual script tags on your site anywhere ever again.
I think this is the actual answer to my question.
Maybe you will find pluggable_js gem as suitable solution.
The LoadJS gem is another option:
Paloma project offers interesting approach to manage page specific javascript code.
Usage example from their docs:
I haven't tried this out, but it looks like the following is true:
if you have a content_for that is javascript (e.g. with real javascript within it), sprockets would not know about it and thus this would work the same way as it does now.
if you want to exclude a file from the big bundle of javascript, you would go into config/sprockets.yml file and modify the source_files accordingly. Then, you would just include any of the files that you excluded where needed.
Philip's answer is quite good. Here is the code to make it work:
In application.html.erb:
<body class="<%=params[:controller].parameterize%>">
Assuming your controller is called Projects, that will generate:
<body class="projects">
Then in projects.js.coffee:
Here's how to do it especially if you don't have to execute tons of libraries for your specific page, but only to run a few hundreds lines of JS more or less.
Since it's perfectly fine to embed Javascript code into HTML, just create under app/views shared.js directory and place there your page/pages specific code inside my_cool_partial.html.erb
So now from wherever you want you simply do:
And that's it, k?