I am a little confused with forms in RoR.
I have a contacts page with a corresponding method in my controller. What I am trying to do is have a form so people can leave a message. I will then be emailing that message to myself.
I have the form and everything created. However, I am a little confused on how I would actually get the data from the form once they hit the submit button. would it just be accessible through my contacts method in my controller using params[:message]?
Also, what if I had multiple forms on one page? Would I just be doing params[:message1], params[:message2], etc., in the contacts method in my controller?
Take a look at this answer for details on what exactly the params hash is. When you reference params[:message], this implies that you are POST'ing to your controller action with, say, "message[subject]=abc123", which Rails helpfully turns into a hash with a key like: params[:message]['subject'].
If you're looking to send an email, check out mail_form, which simplifies creating a non-database-backed model that get's turned into an email.
Lastly, about having multiple forms on a page: each form POST's to its action and includes all of the form elements that are children of that form in the DOM. So, only the children of that message will actually be included in the params[:message] hash. You can use fields_for to have multiple models within a single form.
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It's been a while since I've used Rails and I think I've gotten a little rusty. Is there a way to do this?
I'm trying to make a messaging feature that allows one user type to message another. I want the button to display on the User index page and the user show page. When the button is clicked a modal will popup with a form contained therein.
Currently I've made a Message model with three columns: user_type1_id, user_type2_id and message_body.
Should I make a distinct controller for this new model? Or should I put the logic in the controller of user_type1 (the usertype that will be messaged)?
Any other suggestions would be welcome.
Controllers are there primarily to get data from the database and get it ready for the views. So if you have user#index and user#show pages, then you should use the UsersController for all the logic associated with those views, even though it uses other modals. It really is the "Rails Way". If, however, you were to create a message#index page, then you should create the associated MessagesController.
Also, there is nothing wrong with creating a partial and sticking in the messages view directory (the filename would be, say, messages/_form.html.erb). Then, whenever you needed that form (throughout the entire site), all you would need to do was type:
<%= render 'messages/form' %>
I have a multipart form that I need a captcha for at the end. Essentially, a user is allowed to create/update a draft but not submit it for admin review until everything is done. There is a captcha meant for the last submission but the problem is that when I add it to the form, I can't use any of the other submit buttons because the captcha isn't filled out. Is there any way around this?
I'm using simple_captcha and Rails 3.2.
Thanks!
I haven't used simple_captcha before, but seems like you are doing #object.save_with_captcha in every case. You have multiple options to solve this, but one i came up with is:
In the controller, verify if all the fields (mandatory only i guess) are filled, and if they are, then save your object using #object.save_with_captcha, otherwise do the usual #object.save which wont trigger the captcha validation. Something like this:
def create
#object = MyObject.new(params[:my_object])
if #object.has_mandatory_fields_filled?
#object.save_with_captcha
else
#object.save
end
end
In the has_mandatory_fields_filled? method you would check that all the mandatory fields of your form are not empty/nil etc.
G'day guys, I have a current set of data, and I generate multiple analyses of this data (each analysis into its own active record item called a pricing_interval) using a helper function at the moment.
Currently to analyse the set of data, you need a start time(using datetime_select) an integer (using text_field) and a name (using text_field)
I would like on submission of the form to be redirected to the index page of my pricing_interval, as the values will be re-generated. Manually generating a range proves that my helper methods work.
How would I build a form that on submit would send parameters to a function in the form of (date,integer,name) so that it could immediately begin work whilst redirecting the user to server/pricing_intervals
Anything at all would help, I've spent hours over the past few days trying to get the rails form syntax working properly to no avail, a really straightforward guide to what I would implement to get this working would be amazingly appreciated.
I've looked through the form guides, as I'm not creating an object, but merely parsing params, there's got to be an easy way to do this, right?
You can use the rails form helper hidden_field_tag to put in whatever form fields you want. They are added to the params hash that your controller will see. You don't have to only send form fields that correspond to an ActiveRecord model.
I am trying to build a Rails app with multiple models in a single form, and multiple forms on a single page. To make that work (according to my limited knowledge), I have to drop out of the scaffold code and the "form_for :model" helper and use "form_tag" instead. However when I do that, I lose the ability to automatically catch and report form validation errors in the view (with the error message in the flash[:error] and have the invalid fields highlighted.
If I have a controller method for a form that has to validate data from multiple models, how to I pass the validation errors back to the form? What do I have to do to get the invalid fields highlighted?
(For the longest time I didn't "get" Rails forms, because I thought they were useless Ruby wrappers for HTML code. Now that I am working in a non-Rails environment, I realize how much hard work they save because validation is tied to ActiveRecord validaions, and if a validation fails, the form can be reposted with the invalid fields hightlighted and a useful message in flash[:error]).
To add multiples models to a simple form, after rails 2.3 you just have to add accepts_nested_attributes_for in your model, the model that will be connected with your controllers and views, change the views to support information from another models (with field_for) and maybe build the reference objects in your controllers. Check these links:
http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2009/2/1/what-s-new-in-edge-rails-nested-attributes.
http://github.com/alloy/complex-form-examples
I am developing an Rails 2.3.1 Web site. Throughout the Web site, I need to have a form for creating Posts on various pages (Home page, Create Posts page, Post listing page, Comment listing page, etc. -- suffice to say this form needs to be on many pages served by a variety of controllers). Each of these pages displays a wide variety of other information that is retrieved in the corresponding controller/action. Ex, the home page lists latest 10 posts, content pulled from the DB, etc.
So, I've moved the Post creation form into its own partial, and included this partial on all the necessary pages. Note that the form in the Partial POSTs to /questions (which routes to PostsController::create -- this is default rails behavior).
The problem I am running into is when the the Posts form is not completed correctly, by default the PostsController::create method render's questions/new.html.erb, even if the form was submitted from the home page (/home/index.html.erb).
I tried changing the form in the partial to submit the "submitting_controller" and "submitting_action", and in PostsController::create, when #post.save? == false, I render action => "../submitting_controller/submitting_action" (Which is slightly hacky, but lets you render actions from non-PostsController's).
This seemed to work OK on the surface. The incomplete form was rendered in the view that submitted it with all the correct #post.errors message, etc. The problem was ALL the other data on the pages didnt show up, because the actual submitting_controller/submitting_action methods weren't called, just the associated view. (Remeber, I did a render which preserves instance objects, rather than a redirect_to which does not preserve the #post instance object which has all the error messages and submitted values.)
As far as I can see I have two options:
1) I can store the #post object in the session when #post.save? fails in PostsController::create, redirect_to submitting_controller/submitting_action, at which point i pull the #post object out of the session and use it to re-populate the form/error messages. (As far as I understand, storing objects in the session is BAD practice in rails)
2) I can move all the logic used to pull non-post creation form data from the various submitting_controller/submitting_action, put it in the ApplicationController, create a giant switch statement in PostsController::create for submitting_controller/submitting_action and call the methods in the ApplicationController to grab all the extra data needed for each submitting page's render.
Thoughts on the best way to do this within Rails?
By any chance is your Post model in a belongs_to relationship with each model who's controller you'll be using to render your form? Are you doing any special processing in the Post controller beyond Post.create(params[:post])?
If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second, you could get by with minimal mangling by adding accepts_nested_attributes_for to each of the controllers on which a user can create a post.
Regardless, Robertpostill is correct in that this is probably when to start looking at AJAX, to just replace the section of the page. The only problem is what to do if a user has javascript disabled. Personally I like to do design for the non-javascript case and add convenience methods.
As for thoughts on what you consider your two options,
1) I've used this method to store a shallow copy of an object in the flash hash. Preserving it across redirects. However this might not work for you given the variable nature of posts. As you can only send about 4K worth of data, and that includes other information in addition to your shallow copy.
2) See robertpostill's response
This is about the point that you move from full page updates to updating sections of a page through the use of AJAX. There are a bunch of things you should consider but the most rails-esque approach would be to split the response between an AJAX response and a plain HTML response. Check out this ONLamp article, this register article or the awesome agile web development with rails book. Essentially your controller renders a new div replacing the old div containing the result of submitting the partial.
In your question you mention two approaches and so I'll try and give you some pointers on why and why not here:
Option 1) Ths option is not so bad with a couple of tweaks. The main tweak is is to store the object in a serialized form in the DB. Then simply pass around the ID of the serialized object. Your upsides are that the session data gets persisted so recovering a a session is neater and your session stays light. The downside of this is that having a bucket of session cruft in your DB will pollute your app and you'l need to do some thinking as to how you expire unused session cruft from the DB. I've never seen this end well...
Option2) Eeek not inside the application_controller! :) Seriously, keep that as your weapon of last resort. You can pop things insde the helpers though and get access to those methods inside your controllers and views. However the testing of that stuff is not so easy so be careful before choosing that route. Switch statements can be replaced in OO apps with a little thinking, certainly in his case you can use option hashes to get a railsy way of having some smarts about the state of the app at the time the request is made.