title: How to render a partial from javascript
body: <p>I have a select that gets populated depending on the selection in a different select
  To do this, I did what is recommended in Railscast #88 on 'Dynamic Select Menus'.</p>
  
  <p>But now I need to render a partial, passing in the value selected in each of those selects.
  I can't figure out how to simply trigger a method call from the :onchange event in the select, so I'm thinking I need to call render :partial from within the javascript handler that detects the selects change event. But I can't figure out how. I tried the following in the javascript method (in the .js.erb file) but it doesn't work as hoped:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function staffSelected() {
      $('date_area').show();
      &lt;% render :partial =&gt; "calendar" -%&gt;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Anyone have a good solution?</p>