How to do partial page update with jQuery?

Question

I have navigation menu. When clicked, only page content div should be updated from html content file (that in the server) without doing a full page refresh.

How can I achieve this using jQuery?

Answer 1

Build your menu as per usual, i.e.

<ul id="menu">
    <li><a href="about-us.html">About Us</a>
    <li><a href="services.html">Services</a>
    <li><a href="products.html">Products</a>
</ul>

And a placeholder for the content.

<div id="content"></div>

Then run code similar to this

$("#menu li a").click(function(e) {
    // prevent from going to the page
    e.preventDefault();

    // get the href
    var href = $(this).attr("href");
    $("#content").load(href, function() {
        // do something after content has been loaded
    });
});

Answer 2

You need to use the jQuery AJAX methods to accomplish this. There are several ways to go about it. For instance:

Say you have a div with id="mydiv" that you wish update with content from the server. Then:

  $("#mydiv").load("url");

will cause mydiv to be updated with the content returned from url.

This link describes various AJAX methods in jQuery.