Dynamically generate preview links using the Ruby SDK

 You can call the embed_url method from our Ruby SDK to generate a file preview link. This method takes a Box file id as the parameter and returns back a file preview link.

preview_link = embed_url(file)

You can preview the file by accessing the link directly or embedding the link into an iFrame.

Hello Murtza, thank you for that. The embed_url() method does seem to draw the page quicker than the two I was using. But my issue remains that with approximately 40 files per page, drawing preview and download links for each takes a bit of time.

Also the links expire after a short period. To dynamically generate the link my approach is to use a jQuery click event, passing the file ID to that function. Then have that function call a Ruby function that will return the result from the embed_url() method.

Here's the code I have so far:

#Java function
html += ''

#html body
html_list += 'Preview'

#Ruby function
def filePreview(fileID)
link = client.embed_url(fileID))
return link
end

I believe I'd need to use ajax to call the Ruby function from javascript. Any suggestions/examples or a better approach would be much appreciated.

Thank you
Jeff

 Your approach of generating the file preview links asynchronously makes sense. As you noted, you can use Ajax to communicate between the browser/client and the server. On the server, you can use embed_url method to request the file preview link from our API. Then you can pass the file preview link back to the browser.