Rails form parameters: params[:controller][:variable] or params[:variable]? - ruby-on-rails

In a Rails controller receiving a form POST, is it better to refer to parameters as params[:controller][:variable] or simply params[:variable]?
Rails' form helpers appears to name some fields as controller[variable] in the view, but the the controller somehow knows how to find the value when the controller uses params[:variable]. In other cases, it doesn't seem to know, particularly when I use a different controller name (e.g. form_for(#model, :as => :othercontroller, :url => :othercontroller_path(#model)).
The Rails documentation indicates that params[:variable] is sufficient, but this doesn't seem to be the case?

Related

ruby on rails 4.2 - ActionController::UrlGenerationError in Prodotti#new

I'm following the tutorial http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html but i'm stuck on section 5.2 'the first form'
The error is after i put prodotti_path
<%= form_for :prodotto, url: prodotti_path do |f| %>
my rake routes:
Prefix Verb URI Pattern Controller#Action
welcome_index GET /welcome/index(.:format) welcome#index
prodotti_index GET /prodotti(.:format) prodotti#index
POST /prodotti(.:format) prodotti#create
new_prodotti GET /prodotti/new(.:format) prodotti#new
edit_prodotti GET /prodotti/:id/edit(.:format) prodotti#edit
prodotti GET /prodotti/:id(.:format) prodotti#show
PATCH /prodotti/:id(.:format) prodotti#update
PUT /prodotti/:id(.:format) prodotti#update
DELETE /prodotti/:id(.:format) prodotti#destroy
root GET / welcome#index
but when i refresh the page http://localhost:3000/prodotti/new/ the rails say:
ActionController::UrlGenerationError in Prodotti#new
Why? i'm new to ruby and ror, sorry !
Firstly, welcome to the Rails community!
Here's what you need to do:
#app/controllers/prodottis_controller.rb
class ProdottisController < ApplicationController
def new
#prodotti = Prodotti.new
end
def create
#prodotti = Prodotti.new prodotti_params
end
private
def prodotti_params
params.require(:prodotti).permit(:x, :y, :z)
end
end
Then in your view:
#app/views/prodotti/new.html.erb
<%= form_for #prodotti do |f| %>
<%= f.text_field :attribute_name %>
<%= f.submit %>
<% end %>
OOP
The problem you have is you're using a symbol in your form_for. Whilst this does work, it is not the best way to get it working, especially for a beginner.
Without going into too much detail, I'll explain that form_for is what's known as a helper method. If you pass this certain credentials, it will construct an HTML form for you:
Typically, a form designed to create or update a resource reflects the
identity of the resource in several ways: (i) the url that the form is
sent to (the form element's action attribute) should result in a
request being routed to the appropriate controller action (with the
appropriate :id parameter in the case of an existing resource), (ii)
input fields should be named in such a way that in the controller
their values appear in the appropriate places within the params hash,
and (iii) for an existing record, when the form is initially
displayed, input fields corresponding to attributes of the resource
should show the current values of those attributes.
In Rails, this is usually achieved by creating the form using form_for
and a number of related helper methods. form_for generates an
appropriate form tag and yields a form builder object that knows the
model the form is about. Input fields are created by calling methods
defined on the form builder, which means they are able to generate the
appropriate names and default values corresponding to the model
attributes, as well as convenient IDs, etc.
This basically means that you're meant to pass objects to the form_for helper - objects which have been built in your model and assigned in your controller.
The objects in Ruby are used by Rails throughout your application. Indeed, as Ruby is object orientated, all the things you do with the language, and frameworks, are meant to revolve around objects too.
Rails is object orientated in its own way. Remember, Rails is a framework which sits on top of Ruby. Thus, anything you do has to have objects at the center of the flow:
Models construct the objects in Rails.
Everything from your routes to controller actions take the idea that your models will be invoking data objects -- making it that each "helper" method in Rails (such as form_for) can be used with the corresponding objects you've built.
This is why I recommended setting the appropriate variable and passing it to your form helper. This will tie into your routes and controller actions, and should work for you.

Submit a form to a Rails route with a dynamic segment

I have a route that looks like
match 'solar_systems/:planet_num/:moon_num' => 'solar_system#moon', :as => :moon
I'd like to have a form with a select box for planet number and moon number and have it submit to this route. However I cannot use moon_path because it will have an error if the dynamic parameters are not included in it like this moon_path(4, 1). Is what I want even possible? If so, what do I give to the form tag for the route?
You don't have to use the routing helper methods, and here you can't since at the time of rendering your form you do not know the required parameters. You do, however, know the controller and action, which is really all that's needed for the destination URL. So this should work:
= form_tag('/solar_systems/moon') do
= select_tag(:planet_num, ...
= select_tag(:moon_num, ...
This should render the form tag. To process the request, you will also have to add another route so the right controller action is called:
match 'solar_systems#moon' => 'solar_system#moon', :via => :post
Or, if it makes more sense in the context of your application, you could modify your existing route to make the parameters optional:
match 'solar_systems(/:planet_num(/:moon_num')) => 'solar_system#moon', :as => :moon
See this Rails guide for more details on non-resourceful routes.
If you use this params on controller you need to specified what params is each one, btw in you helper you need to do something like this
moon_path(planet_moon: 4, moon_num: 1)
Cheers!

Custom name for params hash from Rails form_for

Ordinarily, using form_for(#foo) means that on the back end of the form's action, you'll have the form data in params[:foo], but in my case I'd like to have a custom namespace applied to these params, i.e. params[:bar], not params[:foo].
I'm not talking about making the namespace longer by supplying the :namespace argument to the form_for method. To the contrary, my current name is overlong, and I want to shorten it. More importantly, I'm actually swapping a new model in place of an existing one, so the controller is filled with calls to params[:quoter], whereas our new model supplies params[:company_quoter_intf_quoter]. Any ideas?
Specs: Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.2.3
What you are looking for is:
form_for(#foo, :as => :bar)
The documentation for this can be found at:
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/FormHelper.html

How Do I Pass A Parameter From link_to To A Controller?

Building a project with Rails 3.1
I would like to provide a link in a parent model's show page that passes the parent model's id to a child object controller's create method.
I'm guessing this will require a custom route, but have no idea how to build it.
Is this possible? Or would I be breaking a Rails convention? I don't want to use a multiple model form if I can avoid it.
Thanks!
You can just pass them in as arbitrary values:
link_to my_path(:extra_attribute => value, :foo => 'bar')

How to do user content from CMS in Rails

I'm trying to build a CMS in Rails from scratch, and for showing the user generated pages I'm having trouble deciding exactly how to do it.
The way I have it right now, I have a controller named 'content' with a single action called 'show'. In routes.rb I have a rule that passes any name after the name of the website to the content controller, show action with parameter name.
For example, www.mysite.com/about_us would route to
:controller => 'content', :action => 'show', :page => 'about_us'
Inside the content controller, I do a find on the Pages model to locate the named page:
#markup = Page.find_by_name(params[:page])
And then in the show.html.erb view I use the raw helper to display the content:
<%= raw #markup.text %>
Does this method violate anything about the way I should do be doing things in Rails? Or is this an OK solution?
I ended up using the sanitize helper, by default it removes <script> tags which is essentially what you need to prevent XSS, as far as I understand. For those who have found this via a search, the only code that changes from what I described above is that in the view you change to:
<%= sanitize #markup.text %>

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