rails function called from jquery

looking for a way to implement a call to a rails method from within jquery, but without rendering anything, just in the background.

The idea is that I have a select tag with multiselect enabled, my model has a boolean field called active, and when an element is selected, active would be set to true, otherwise false.

in my application.js i have this:

$(".multiselect").change(function() {
    $("option", this).each(function() {
        if(this.selected) {
             // do true for checked
        } else {
             // do false for unchecked
        }
    }
});

this function works fine, but i'm stuck at two parts, i know i can get the id of the object from (this).val(), but where should I put the function that would find it and change the active fi开发者_JS百科eld? In the controller or in the model? Mind I don't need to render anything, just do things in the background.

And secondly, how do i call this function from within my jquery?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

You could submit the form every time the change event gets triggered. This would get mapped to a function in the controller, which will render nothing.

You could do something like this

in your application.js

$(".multiselect").change(function() {
  $("option", this).each(function() {
    if(this.selected) {
         // do true for checked
    } else {
         // do false for unchecked
    }
  }
  //submitting form after doing stuff
  $.post($(this).parent("form") .... );
});

In your controller you would probably map it to an 'update' method

def update
  # logic to update active attribute of model
  render :nothing => true
end