Complete noob Jquery / Rails setup question (probably) - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

Background: I've been doing RoR for about a year now, and am fairly comfortable with it, however, I know next to nothing about Javascript.
I've been playing around with some jquery autocomplete stuff in my rails app. I pretty much had a version working, but needed some tokenized fields too for a one to many relationship.
Right on cue - good old Ryan Bates does a railscast on it. So I start following the instructions.
Got a little bit nervous when I had to start installing 'jquery-rails' gem (I'd already installed jrails to get the other stuff working).
As suspected, it broke some stuff but I managed to get that working again.
Anyway, I got most of the way through the tutorial, and everything was going fine - I've got the tokenizer script to find the correct input field and it acts as expected. I've tested the json link too - that sends back all the right stuff.
However when I start typing in the text field - nothing happens, and when I view the console window it comes back with:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'replace' of undefined
jQuery.jQuery.extend._Deferred.deferred.resolveWith
done
jQuery.ajaxTransport.send.callback
I can make guesses as to why this is going wrong - but any expert advice would be greatly appreciated.
(I should also add - I'm using formtastic too)
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Ok, finally figured it out.
It turns out that my author's name column is not name but rather author. So I needed to make a change inside the js.coffee script to override that default search of name.
The line you need to use is:
propertyToSearch: "author"
My whole book.js.coffee file now looks like this:
jQuery ->
$('#book_author_tokens').tokenInput '/authors.json'
theme: 'mac'
prePopulate: $('#book_author_tokens').data('load')
propertyToSearch: "author"
This actually fixed the error Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'replace' of undefined
Of course, if you do use a different column name you will want to also edit the functions in the author.rb file to reflect that:
def self.tokens(query)
authors = where("author like ?", "%#{query}%")
if authors.empty?
[{id: "<<<#{query}>>>", author: "New: \"#{query}\""}]
else
authors
end
end
def self.ids_from_tokens(tokens)
tokens.gsub!(/<<<(.+?)>>>/) { create!(author: $1).id }
tokens.split(',')
end
Edit
Another thing I had to do for the fieldsto be prepopulated with the existing authors was change this:
= f.input :author_tokens, :data => { :load => #book.author }
To this:
= f.input :author_tokens, :input_html => { :data => { :load => #book.author } }
And then they would show up.
Hope this helps you.