Rails 4 turbo-link prevents jQuery scripts from working

Question

I'm building a Rails 4 app and I have a few scattered js files that I'm trying to include "the rails way". I moved jquery plugins into the /vendor/assets/javascripts and I updated the manifest (application.js) to require them. When I load the pages locally I see that they appear correctly.

However, I'm getting inconsistent behavior from one of the scripts that's compiled. I have a controller-specific js file called projects.js which is referenced in the application.js via the use of require_tree .:

//= require jquery
//= require jquery_ujs
//= require turbolinks
//= require bootstrap.min
//= require jquery.form.min
//= require_tree .

I see the file is included correctly, and it works... half the time. The other half of the time, the stuff in projects.js doesn't seem to do anything (it's mostly jquery animations and some ajax requests). When it doesn't work, I'll click buttons a couple times, nothing will happen, and then I'll throw this error:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'position' of null 
turbolinks.js?body=1:75

This never happened when the scripts were in the individual views (the wrong way), so I'm fairly certain the problem is not with my javascript code. One other potentially relevant details is that the stuff in projects.js is wrapped in a $(document).ready(function(){. Also, I'm testing in development mode so the javascripts and css are not combined by the asset pipeline.

Any idea what's going on here? I'm new to Rails but I've done my best to follow all the conventions.

Update!

It's predictable when my project scripts don't work. The first page load works every time. Then I click one link to a new page which uses my project.js behaviors and the second page never works. I click a few times and eventually throw the error above. I'm still not sure why, but I'm suspecting this is related to turbo-linking.

Answer 1

$(document).ready(function(){ doesn't really work with Turbolinks. Turbolinks:

... makes following links in your web application faster. Instead of letting the browser recompile the JavaScript and CSS between each page change, it keeps the current page instance alive and replaces only the body and the title in the head.

So the page is only loaded once and then pieces are replaced as needed. Since the page is only loaded once, your $(document).ready() callbacks are only triggered when the site is initially visited, you won't get more document-ready events when switching pages because Turbolinks doesn't actually switch pages. From the fine manual:

With Turbolinks pages will change without a full reload, so you can't rely on DOMContentLoaded or jQuery.ready() to trigger your code. Instead Turbolinks fires events on document to provide hooks into the lifecycle of the page.

You probably want to listen for one of the Turbolinks events instead:

• page:change the page has been parsed and changed to the new version and on DOMContentLoaded
• [...]
• page:load is fired at the end of the loading process.

page:change is usually what you're looking for as it is triggered when loading a fresh page and restoring a page from the Turbolinks page cache.

You might want to turn off Turbolinks until you've had time to review all of your JavaScript and you've done a full QA sweep. You should also test your site's speed to see if it is worth using at all.

Another option would be to use jquery.turbolinks to patch up things for you. I haven't used this but other people are using it to good effect.