Reloading everything but one div on a web page - ajax

Question

I'm trying to set up a basic web page, and it has a small music player on it (niftyPlayer). The people I'm doing this for want the player in the footer, and to continue playing through a song when the user navigates to a different part of the site.
Is there anyway I can do this without using frames? There are some tutorials around on changing part of a page using ajax and innerHTML, but I'm having trouble wrapping my head aroung getting everything BUT the music player to reload.
Thank you in advance,
--Adam

Answer 1

Wrap the content in a div, and wrap the player in a separate div. Load the content into the content div.
You'd have something like this:
<div id='content'>
</div>
<div id='player'>
</div>
If you're using a framework, this is easy: $('#content').html(newContent).
EDIT:
This syntax works with jQuery and ender.js. I prefer ender, but to each his own. I think MooTools is similar, but it's been a while since I used it.
Code for the ajax:
$.ajax({
'method': 'get',
'url': '/newContentUrl',
'success': function (data) {
// do something with the data here
}
});
You might need to declare what type of data you're expecting. I usually send json and then create the DOM elements in the browser.
EDIT:
You didn't mention your webserver/server-side scripting language, so I can't give any code examples for the server-side stuff. It's pretty simple most of time. You just need to decide on a format (again, I highly recommend JSON, as it's native to JS).

Answer 2

I suppose what you could do is have to div's.. one for your footer with the player in it and one with everything else; lets call it the 'container', both of course within your body. Then upon navigating in the site, just have the click reload the page's content within the container with a ajax call:
$('a').click(function(){
var page = $(this).attr('page');
// Using the href attribute will make the page reload, so just make a custom one named 'page'
$('#container').load(page);
});
HTML
<a page="page.php">Test</a>
The problem you then face though, is that you wouldnt really be reloading a page, so the URL also doesnt get update; but you can also fix this with some javascript, and use hashtags to load specific content in the container.

Answer 3

Use jQuery like this:
<script>
$("#generate").click(function(){
$("#content").load("script.php");
});
</script>
<div id="content">Content</div>
<input type="submit" id="generate" value="Generate!">
<div id="player">...player code...</div>

Answer 4

What you're looking for is called the 'single page interface' pattern. It's pretty common among sites like Facebook, where things like chat are required to be persistent across various pages. To be honest, it's kind of hard to program something like this yourself - so I would recommend standing on top of an existing framework that does some of the leg work for you. I've had success using backbone.js with this pattern:
http://andyet.net/blog/2010/oct/29/building-a-single-page-app-with-backbonejs-undersc/

Answer 5

You can reload desired DIVs via jQuery.ajax() and JSON:
For example:
index.php
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ajax.js"></script>
<a href='one.php' class='ajax'>Page 1</a>
<a href='two.php' class='ajax'>Page 2</a>
<div id='player'>Player Code</div>
<div id='workspace'>workspace</div>
one.php
<?php
$arr = array ( "workspace" => "This is Page 1" );
echo json_encode($arr);
?>
two.php
<?php
$arr = array( 'workspace' => "This is Page 2" );
echo json_encode($arr);
?>
ajax.js
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
jQuery('.ajax').click(function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
// load the href attribute of the link that was clicked
jQuery.getJSON(this.href, function(snippets) {
for(var id in snippets) {
// updated to deal with any type of HTML
jQuery('#' + id).html(snippets[id]);
}
});
});
});