I have seen a good amount of people wanting to see learn how to load data on their website using jQuery, JSON, and PHP. I thought I would show a simple example that should give you a jump start to your project.
We are going to use $.getJSON() function, you have something like:
$.getJSON("readJSON.php",function(data){
$.each(data.posts, function(i,post){
content = '
\n';
content += '
' + post.author + '
\n';
content += '+ post.date_added + '\n';
content += '' + post.post_content + ';
content += ''
';
$("#contents").append(content).fadeIn("slow");
});
});
And example of JSON from the PHP page could look like:
{ posts: [{"id":"151","date_added":"2009-05-05 13:40:34","post_content":"This is a test post. jQuery!","author":"Ryan"},
{"id":"152","date_added":"2009-05-05 13:40:55","post_content":"Hey, you got to love Ajax","author":"John"}] }
That JSON above loads two records that will be displayed on to the page.
The results are being pulled from a MySQL database with tables: id, author, post_content, date_added, and author.
I am going to wrap up and article on the jQuery/PHP/JSON comment form with the results loaded on to the page after form submission, stay tuned for a much more in depth explanation of using JSON with PHP and jQuery.
Tags: ajax, form, jquery, json, php
Posted in jQuery | 5 Comments »
May 4th, 2009
When I first started working with jQuery and submitting forms via Ajax, I’ve never really used .serialize() and wasn’t too familiar with it. I started to look in to how it works and what it can do. It can be a huge time saver, especially for larger forms.
Instead of declaring all of your data to be sent using something like:
var fname = $('#fname').attr('value');
var lname = $('#lname').attr('value');
$.ajax({
data: “fname=”+ fname + “& lname=” + lname,
});
For a couple of fields above, that is fine, but what if you were creating a form with a large amount of fields. The last thing you would want to do is want to copy/paste that line 20 times for your field. Instead of grabbing each value of each form field we can use jQuery’s .serialize() to do the dirty work for us, which is a huge time saver. We can use something like:
$(function() {
$('form').bind('submit',function() { showValues(); return false; });
});
function showValues() {
var str = $("form").serialize();
$(".results-box").fadeIn();
$(".results").text(str);
}
The first section binds the submit to a function. When a user submits the form call the function showValues(), the next bit. We grab the form and attach .serialize() to it. We want to serialize all fields within this form and display what data is going to be sent to the sever. A working demo has been uploaded.
Now with our data serialized it is ready to be sent over to the server side. Using jQuery .serialize() is much more effiecient compared to retrieving the value using .val().
Tags: ajax, form, jquery, serialize
Posted in jQuery | 2 Comments »
May 4th, 2009
The other day, I wasn’t really too acquainted with the .live() jQuery function. I did some research and it finally clicked for me. I put together a quick example that can I uploaded. The basics of the function can be known as:
Binds a handler to an event (like click) for all current – and future – matched element. Can also bind custom events. – (source: jquery.com)
This function is extremely similar to the .click() but .click() will only match elements that are created via the XHTML with DOM is loaded. With that said, using .live() is extremely useful for dynamic websites, where you are creating/removing elements on you’re website.
Lets see the base example of using .live()
$('a.edit').live('click', function() {
alert("The power of .live() - dynamically created objects will have bound events!")
return false;
});
This code will work for all links that have the class edit, even when new a.link tags are created dynamically after DOM has been loaded. If your code looked like:
$('a.edit-nolive').click(function() {
alert("Items created via AJAX will be called on using .live()")
return false;
});
It would not work on dynamically created items. Lets take another look at the full demo. Hopefully this will clear up any problems with understanding how the jQuery .live() function works in comparison to the .click() event. Like to see something else like this? Drop me a line.
Tags: bind, click, dynamic, jquery, live
Posted in jQuery | 2 Comments »
March 30th, 2009
I am currently working on this site for a client: http://www.hornedpout.com/ – a very basic portfolio website for a designer/writer. I didn’t want to use the bulky code of the jQuery UI so I decided to use the smaller version, below:
$(".menu-header").click(function() {
$(this).next().toggle('slow');
return false;
}).next().hide();
The HTML would look something similar to:
That code will use jQuery’s toggle() function. When the user clicks the h2 tag it will close all elements until the next
tag. This snippet is very handy for creating a quick accordion effect, this can also be found on the jQuery’s documentation
Now we have the guts sorted out, but the problem is if you travel to another page within that category, it will close. I’m sure you want to check out the code that is going to do this.
Keep that open!
var matches;
if( matches = (new String(document.location)).match(/?c=w+/) ) {
$("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();
}
The code above is fairly straight forward. The first line checks to see if we already have a sub-menu open. It evaluates by looking at the current pages URL “?c=page_here”.
The latter part of the code. Now that we grabbed the current URL of the sub-menu, we can use this to find the parent menu which is the
ul and display it:
$("a[href=" + matches[0] + "]").parents("ul").toggle();
The quick fix to keep your accordion block open while traveling to different URLS. To achieve the URLS of “?c=page”. I am using this PHP code below save it as index.php, also create a header.php and a footer.php.
Give it a shot, hope that this can work for you, it did wonders for my project. Also thanks to Kent, for helping me. If it did work post some examples!
Tags: accordion, dynamic, jquery
Posted in Blog, jQuery | No Comments »
