How can I in Rails write a Coffeescript function to update a database column? I guess an Ajax call of sorts would be ideal:
id = $('#document').attr('data-document-id')
$.ajax
url: "/documents/#{id}/update_attr"
type: "GET"
success: (data) ->
console.log(data)
Is something like this the only way? Or is there something better?
Well, keep in mind that frontend code (html, css, js) cannot access the database directly. So you need an AJAX request.
REST best practices would require you to use a POST/PUT/PATCH method instead of the GET method which should never change the state of the application.
Also, you are not passing any value to the Rails backend.
$.ajax
url: "/whatever/#{id}"
type 'POST'
data:
key: value
success: (data)->
console.log data
On the Rails side you need to setup the appropriate route in config/routes.rb:
post '/whatever/:id', to: 'some_controller#some_action'
Still ideally, following the best practices, you probably have some sort of
resources :apples
already mapped to an ApplesController. You now have to implement the action, which will be like this:
def update
@object = Whatever.find(params[:id])
if @object.update(key: params[:key]
render json: { success: 1 }
else
render json: { success: 0 }
end
end
That implementation is not complete (it does not handle HTML requests, multi-key updates and other fancy things), but still it should solve your problem.
