Never the less, I've seen several pages online where this has been an issue for other people and it keeps coming back to haunt me, so here's my fix.

When you're using RJS to do JavaScript magic and you add something simple like

page.replace "main", :partial => "update_student"

and the JavaScript just shows up on the page you're trying to update, then you've found this issue. You see something like this in the browser:

try {
Element.replace("main", "
\r\n
\r\n  Your updates have been recorded\r\n
\r\n
");
} catch (e) { alert('RJS error:\n\n' + e.toString()); alert('Element.replace(\"main\", \"
\\r\\n
\\r\\n  Your updates have been recorded\\r\\n
\\r\\n
\");'); throw e }

The problem is that the RJS libraries didn't include the SCRIPT tag. I think it gets confused and thinks the tag is already in place.

The fix is pretty simple... add the SCRIPT tag. In RJS you can always add raw JavaScript to the page with the

 << 

page << ' <SCRIPT type="text/javascript">'
page.replace "main", :partial => "update_student"
page << ' </SCRIPT>'

And it all works the way I think it should... which is to say, maybe not quite the way the authors intended for it to be used, but it seems to be working for me so far....

So, if you're using RJS and the JavaScript shows up on the page, just add an opening and closing set of SCRIPT tags before and after the RJS call in question.