jQuery UI Dialog instead of alert() for Rails 3 data-confirm attribute

Question

In Rails 3, passing a :confirm parameter to link_to will populate the data-confirm attribute of the link. This will induce a JS alert() when the link is clicked.

I am using the rails jQuery UJS adapter (https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs). The relevant code from rails.js is:

$('body').delegate('a[data-confirm], button[data-confirm], input[data-confirm]', 'click.rails', function () {
    var el = $(this);
    if (el.triggerAndReturn('confirm')) {
        if (!confirm(el.attr('data-confirm'))) {
            return false;
        }
    }
});

and

triggerAndReturn: function (name, data) {
        var event = new $.Event(name);
        this.trigger(event, data);

        return event.result !== false;
    }

I would like to know how this could be modified to instead yield a jQuery dialog (e.g. the jQuery UI Dialog) allowing the user to confirm or cancel.

My knowledge of JavaScript isn't sufficient to achieve this elegantly. My current approach would be to simply rewrite the $('body').delegate() function to instead instantiate a lightbox. However I imagine that there is a more effective approach than this.

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, you cannot use a jQuery dialog box, as $.rails.confirm needs to block until it returns the users answer.

However, you can overwrite $.rails.allowAction in your application.js file like this:

$.rails.allowAction = function(element) {
        var message = element.data('confirm'),
        answer = false, callback;
        if (!message) { return true; }

        if ($.rails.fire(element, 'confirm')) {
                myCustomConfirmBox(message, function() {
                        callback = $.rails.fire(element,
                                'confirm:complete', [answer]);
                        if(callback) {
                                var oldAllowAction = $.rails.allowAction;
                                $.rails.allowAction = function() { return true; };
                                element.trigger('click');
                                $.rails.allowAction = oldAllowAction;
                        }
                });
        }
        return false;
}

function myCustomConfirmBox(message, callback) {
        // implement your own confirm box here
        // call callback() if the user says yes
}

It works by returning false immediately, thus effectively canceling the click event. However, your custom function can then call the callback to actually follow the link/submit the form.