Rails Javascript and link_to

You can use data- attributes to pass arbitrary values to a HTML element:

link_to service.company.name,           # e.g. "ACME"
        '#',
        :class => 'specific_service', 
        :data => {:id => service.id}    # e.g. 12345
which will result in something like this:

<a href="#" class="specific_service" data-id="12345">ACME</a>
this can be retrieved inside the Javascript, e.g. with jQuery:

$('.specific_service').click(function() {
  var id = $(this).data('id');

  // now do something with the id
});
note that i used :class not :id because the element can occur multiple times.