jQuery, AJAX, and rendering views

Archives Yii 1.0.x Discussions
1

Hey folks, I’m working on a project that uses a jQuery UI drag-n-drop system to add/remove widgets from a profile. The database has flags corresponding to profile widgets; a controller checks the flags, sends them to widgets in a view, and the widgets decide whether or not to render. The page I’m working on has a list of checkboxes for widgets and a submit button to update the database with enabled/disabled values.

Now, how would I handle this with AJAX? I can use use standard jQuery AJAX, something like…




$.post("http://mysite/member/profile",$("#shownWidgets").serialize(),function(data){

     alert(data);

});

…but that left me scratching me head as to how to render the widget, without having a page refresh. Does Yii have any - er - magical powers that help with this? I was considering making a view for each widget, then rendering each view in the profile (which doesn’t seem terribly efficient); this way I could call a ‘render widget view’ action in the profile and insert the returned data in the page somewhere, but that seems sloppy…

2

Can’t you just show/hide in your callback?

3

Hmm… I suppose that’s possible, although it seems like a waste to load all the widgets (they work pretty heavily on the database) even if they’re not being used. But that idea sounds simple :) Isn’t there a render partial or something that works well with AJAX in Yii though?