rails newbie herem, I'm looking to learn a little bit about jquery so I figured I'd try to switch between my partial views using AJAX.

Right now on my user's dash I have a link to their 'likes' page, it requires a full reload to see the 'likes' page, how would I change this to refresh with the likes_user_path@user)??

views/pages/home.html.erb

  <div id="left">
    <div id="dash-statistics">
       <a href="<%= likes_user_path(@user) %>">
         <div id="likes" class="stat">Likes
           <%= @user.likes.count %>
         </div>
       </a>
    </div>
  </div>

  <div id="right">
    <div id="content">
    </div>
  </div>

UsersController

  def likes
    @title = "Likes"
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
    @like_stuff = @user.likes.paginate(:page => params[:page])
    render 'show_likes' 
  end

What I understand is that you want to reload the likes by clicking a link, by using ajax, in your user dashboard.

First thing to do is rewrite the link, and add a :remote => true like this:

<%= link_to "Likes", likes_user_path(@user), :remote => true %>

Then, in your controller, make sure you have a respond_to :html, :js at the top (there can of course be other options, but :js has to be among them)

After that, you could do a function called likes in your controller which to use for loading the likes, which looks something like yours, only you don't do render at the end, but respond_with @likes. By having :js in the respond_to filter, Rails will automagically act accordingly when supposed to.

Next, make a corresponding view called likes.js.erb (i'm not exactly sure if coffeescript will work out of the box in this case) in which you put something like

$('#likes').html('<%= escape_javascript(render "likes", :likes => @likes) %>');

This assumes that in your main view in which you want to render the likes ,there's an element with the id=likes which could look like this:

<div id="likes">
  <%= render "likes", :likes => @likes %>
</div>

and there's also a _likes.html.erb partial which renders the likes

<% likes.each do |like| %>
  <div>
    <%= like.name %>
  </div>
<% end %>

And with this I think I pretty much covered it.