Don't fire ajaxyness if "data-remote"="false"

[simsalabim]

Hi all,

It seems sort of weird that link/form/btn which has "data-remote"="false" is treated as if it had "data-remote"="true" (or just "data-remote"). Taking into account that we regularly do use ujs functionality with rails helpers, almost everyone passes a value to the data-remote attribute.

It will be useful in such cases as the following (simplified example):

- @links.each do |link|
  = link_to link.name, link.href, data: { remote: link.remote? }

Despite the fact the case I stumbled upon is quite rare, having ajax proceeding with "data-remote"="false" seems weird anyway.

[JangoSteve]

I think I'd rather stick with the principle of least surprise here. When you have HTML5 data attributes (or really just any attributes in general), there's no such thing as a false value; since the values are considered strings, falsey would be leaving it absent or undefined. I'd prefer not to have code in UJS where we're defining specific non-blank strings to be falsey.

That being said, I see the value, and I think I'd be fine with it if there weren't another really easy way to accomplish this already. Instead of using data: { remote: link.remote? }, you should use the actual rails way of just remote: true.

- @links.each do |link|
  = link_to link.name, link.href, remote: link.remote?

It's actually shorter and easier than what you have. If you use the built-in rails helper, it's smart enough to exclude the data-remote attribute from the HTML when you pass remote: false.

[simsalabim]

@JangoSteve thanks for the reply. The principle of least surprise is the thing urged me to send this pull request.
This is not about HTML5 only, but about interaction between HTML5 and Javascript.

And as of link.data('remote') returns Object, not String, and in particular if property was set to "false" it returns Boolean, I am convinced that handling it the right way would be to respect such falsy attributes.

I can add that the app I'm working on toggles data-remote on client side as well, and if in Rails we have such a smart helper, javascript is the final frontier and toggling attribute to true/false is more intuitive rather than adding/removing it.

But I hope that the 2nd paragraph is quite powerful argument :)

Regards,
Alex.

[simsalabim]

Just to be clear - @JangoSteve's expectations (from the linked discussion):

<a data-remote></a> <!-- old behavior, link is remote -->
<a data-remote=true></a> <!-- old behavior, link is remote -->
<a data-remote=false></a> <!-- new behavior, link is not remote -->

All the expectations are met, corresponding tests pass.

[simsalabim]

Bump. Rebased from latest master.

@rafaelfranca please, take a look. All tests pass.
I think this is still a valid contribution :)

[rafaelfranca]

I think we only need:

// Checks "data-remote" if true to handle the request through a XHR request.

[rafaelfranca]

Sorry for the delay. I made some few comments, otherwise looks good.

[simsalabim]

@rafaelfranca made suggested changes and CI is 💚

[rafaelfranca]

Merged at 99c798d. Thank you