DISQUS

I also got into Ruby before Rails (although only by a period of a few months so I was still a Ruby newbie when Rails first started making news). I also have experience the "Ruby can do XYZ" with my responding "didn't everybody know that". I also enjoyed the discussion on ruby-talk for a long while. But as Ruby continues to get more popular the volume on the mailing list got so high that I couldn't keep up with it. The content is good but the volume is just too much to keep up with. Seems to be a common problem on the best newgroups. Wish there was a way to combat that volume in a sensible way.

I know this post is old but thought I would post an alternate solution for anybody else that comes along this post.

I had a very similar problem that I was solving with delay as well. It worked because the timing was right but it didn't seem elegant as it could be. Then I found the update_page helper which is great for putting JavaScript on HTML event handlers and for RJS. The following is a snippet example that will fade out some info, replace it with new info and fade it back in without using delay:


display_actions = update_page do |p|
  p.replace_html 'family-info', :partial => @event
  p.visual_effect :appear, 'family-info'
end
page.visual_effect :fade, 'family-info', :to => 0.01,
  :afterFinish => "function() {#{display_actions}}"


The only thing to make this nice is to create a helper that will wrap the JavaScript in a function. Something like:


def javascript_function(code)
  "function() {#{code}}"
end


Then you can make your RJS just be:


display_actions = update_page do |p|
  p.replace_html 'family-info', :partial => @event
  p.visual_effect :appear, 'family-info'
end
page.visual_effect :fade, 'family-info', :to => 0.01,
  :afterFinish => javascript_function(display_actions)