turbolinks_render

Use render in your Rails controllers and handle the response with Turbolinks.

Turbolinks supports redirect_to out of the box. But render is not supported and you have to use workarounds for common things like dealing with forms. This gem aims to fix that.

I think Turbolinks/Rails should handle this officially. If you agree you can vote for this idea.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'turbolinks_render'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Usage

By default, render will be handled by Turbolinks if these conditions are met:

It's an ajax request
It's not a get request
It generates an html response (text/html content type)

When these conditions are met and render is used:

The page content is replaced with the rendered content with Javascript. It uses Turbolinks to do this replacement, so it is pretty smart about keeping the <head> when it's identical, executing <script> elements, etc.
An event turbolinks:load is dispatched

You can disable turbolinks on a given request with:

render turbolinks: false

Configuration

You can invert the default behavior: never use turbolinks for rendering unless explicitly indicated. Create a file config/initializers/turbolinks_render.rb and toggle turbolinks_render.render_with_turbolinks_by_default:

Rails.application.config.turbolinks_render.render_with_turbolinks_by_default = false

In this case, to use turbolinks you should write:

render turbolinks: true

You can also ignore specific paths in your application. This can be useful if you're using an engine and don't have access to its code to change the render calls. For instance, to ignore anything that starts with /admin:

Rails.application.config.turbolinks_render.ignored_paths = [
  '/admin'
]

Implementation notes

It configures a rack middleware that intercept requests and modify responses when the expected conditions are met.
It uses some internal Turbolinks classes to perform the rendering. This makes the DOM-update logic very smart but it could introduce problems with future Turbolink versions , since this does not belong to its public API. I'll do my best to keep things up to date.

Example

An example and an explanatory blog post are also available.

Credits

Original implementation based on this idea by @nerdcave.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.