hughevans.net

Looking at the RSpec docs it was not so obvious to me how you handled a XHR request in your controller specs, so here it is:

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xhr :get, :index

Simple of course, just passing in the HTTP request type and the action you want requested to the xhr method. Still it is slightly confusing compared to the syntax for a regular get request which has it’s own get method:

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get :index

For interests sake here is the code I was testing, it is an improved way of doing AJAX pagination with rails and jQuery than what is suggested here because using respond_to request.js when setting the request header to ‘text/javascript’ in jQuery like so doesn’t work reliably with all browsers.

The controller:

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def index
  @users = User.paginate(:order => 'name', :page => params[:page])
  render(:partial => 'table', :layout => false) if request.xhr? # Otherwise render index.haml
end

And the spec for the xhr part:

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describe "handling XHR /admin/users (for table AJAX pagination)" do
  def do_xhr_get
    xhr :get, :index
  end
  
  it "should be successful" do
    do_xhr_get
    response.should be_success
  end

  it "should render table partial template" do
    do_xhr_get
    response.should render_template('_table')
  end
end