Rails spinoffs - Oct 2005 - Ajax.Updater form values

Hi

I came across this while testing which may be somewhat unnatural but  
could be useful.  I wanted to see the html that was being sent back  
to the browser by Ajax.Updater, so I was specifying a <textarea> as  
the target container.  This worked fine in Firefox both platforms,  
but not in Safari or IE6.  After investigating it seems that setting  
the innerHTML property of form objects is the problem.

I modified the Ajax.Updater.prototype.updateContent method to check  
if the container has a "value" attribute and set that instead if it  
exists

       if (this.options.insertion) {
         new this.options.insertion(receiver, response);
       } else if (receiver.value !== undefined) {
           //form inputs need to set their value in Safari and IE
         receiver.value = response;
       } else {
         receiver.innerHTML = response;
       }

Also due to errors in my server script, which caused an empty reply,  
the responseText attribute was sometime not defined even though the  
status was successful.  So when the regular expression was applied to  
this javascript terminates with an error, so it would probably be  
worth adding a test for the existence of responseText prior to  
accessing it.

Regards

Toby