jQuery.rest

A plugin to ease AJAX interaction with RESTful APIs such as Rails

Accepted Parameters

There are four public jQuery methods created by this plugin:

jQuery.create
jQuery.read
jQuery.update
jQuery.destroy

Each function accepts 1-4 parameters:

URL [, data ] [, success ] [, failure ]

URL: The url of the resource, which can include a dynamically populated value surrounded by {braces}
data: (optional) The data to post to the resource, also used to populate dynamic values.
      In GET requests, data will be added to the url as query-string parameters
success: (optional) The success callback
failure: (optional) The failure callback

In addition to these parameters, you can simply pass a standard jQuery.Ajax options object instead as the only parameter.

Example

Create a new 'task' record with a success callback

$.create(
  '/tasks',
  { description: 'follow up after meeting' },
  function (reponse) {
    alert('successfully added task.');
  }
);
// => [POST] /tasks
// => authenticity_token: K06+3rRMlMuSoG60+Uw6UIo6UsZBbtIIPu2GaMbjf9s=
// => description: follow up after meeting

Read an existing 'account' object and add it to the page (this callback is making some assumptions about your controller -- YMMV)

$.read(
  '/accounts/2486',
  function (response) {
    $('ul#accounts').append(response);
  }
);    
// => [GET] /accounts/2486

Update an existing 'task' record with ID 54

$.update(
  '/tasks/54',
  { description: 'lunch tomorrow after 1pm' }
);    
// => [POST] /tasks/54
// => authenticity_token: K06+3rRMlMuSoG60+Uw6UIo6UsZBbtIIPu2GaMbjf9s=
// => _method: update
// => description: lunch tomorrow after 1pm

Update a nested 'task' record using dynamic IDs

$.update(
  '/accounts/{account_id}/tasks/{id}',
  { id: 54, account_id: 11387, description: 'lunch tomorrow after 1pm' }
);    
// => [POST] /accounts/11387/tasks/54
// => authenticity_token: K06+3rRMlMuSoG60+Uw6UIo6UsZBbtIIPu2GaMbjf9s=
// => _method: update
// => description: lunch tomorrow after 1pm

Delete a 'task' object with ID 54

$.destroy('/tasks/54')

// => [POST] /tasks/54
// => _method: delete

Delete a 'task' object using alternate syntax

$.destroy({
  url: '/tasks/54',
  success: function (response) {
    alert('successfully deleted task.');
  }
});
// => [POST] /tasks/54
// => _method: delete

Regarding authenticity_token

Currently this assumes that you are putting the authenticity_token for the page in a JS variable called window.AUTH_TOKEN. This is simple enough to change if you want to do it differently.

If you do not define window.AUTH_TOKEN, jquery.rest will simply ignore this feature.