title: Attaching functionality to a button in rails 3
body: <p>I have a set of buttons displaying on my webpage. The effect of clicking one of the buttons needs to be that a call is made to an external API (and maybe the response being received, and updating something on the page).</p>
  
  <p>Some additional information: these buttons are placed on the page by a partial, and make up part of a list of users. The buttons are intended to activate and deactivate the users being listed. I'm not sure if this setup will affect the best approach for doing what I want to do, so I thought it would be worth mentioning.</p>
  
  <p>How should this be done? Should the buttons be links to some controller within my rails app? Wouldn't that require the page to be reloaded when the button is hit? Can I offload that request to ajax?, etc.</p>
  
  <p>I don't know the best way to approach this, and any guidance would prove invaluable.</p>