How do I tell my Rails controller to use the format.json part of my method instead of the format.html branch?

Question

I'm running Rails and trying to set up an autocomplete on my text field. I want to submit to a controller method. If I'm submitting from my form (using the "Submit" button), I'd like to use the "format.html" branch. If I'm submitting using the autocomplete Ajax call, I'd like to use the "format.json" branch ...

  def search
    if params.has_key?("s")
      search = params[:s].strip
      @people = Person.where("name ilike ?", "%#{search.upcase}%")
      respond_to do |format|
        format.html {
          if @people.size == 1
            redirect_to controller: 'votes', action: 'show', id: @people.first.id
          end
        }
        format.json { @people.map(&:name) }
      end
    end
  end

I set up the autocomplete on my text field like so

$(function() {
  return $('#s').autocomplete({
    source: function(request, response) {
        $.get('/people/search', { s: request.term }, function(data) {
           alert(data)
           response(data.split('\n'));
        });
    }
  });
});

but what's happening is the value of "data" is an HTML page, as if I were submitting via the format.html method. How do I configure things so that my autocomplete call forces me to render the JSON response from my controller?

Answer 1

Specify .json format in the url like this -

$.get('/people/search.json', { s: request.term }, function(data) {
   alert(data)
   response(data.split('\n'));
});

To send raw json data In Controller change. Otherwise it will look for template to build json (by default rails will look for search.json.jbuilder)

format.json { render json: {people: @people.pluck(:name)} }