I'm working with Ruby on rails 2.3.4 and I'd like to pass some parameters from one page to another ones the first one is submitted.
For example:
On the first page, I have a form that when it's filled a Preview button can be clicked to check all the info entered before submitting the form. That button redirects to another page with the info entered before, but I don't know how to get it in the second page.
There are two possible solutions:
You can emulate the stepped form filling by creating a record in first form and saving it with status "unverified" or "pending". This way you won't have to deal with hidden form fields in 2nd and 3rd pages. All you'll need to pass is the id of pending record. You'll just need to update record status to "active" once the data is confirmed.
Use client side paginated from (all popular JS frameworks have plugins for this). Hence you will only display different <div>s in single loaded page (something like an interface for a setup wizard).
Related
I'm somewhat new to rails and am wrapping a GUI around a CLI tool to give some non-technical users some self-service. Part of the tool contains a page where the user selects a few values from some drop downs etc, and then clicks one of a few buttons on the screen to kick off their desired actions. The fields where they make their selections are outside of the forms that the buttons belong to. On button click, I want to call a javascript function that will grab the values the user selected, and post an ajax call back to the server to run the command corresponding to the button, and then when the request returns I want to insert the command output into a text area.
The only problem I'm having is with getting the values of the fields outside of the form generated by button to, and including them in the ajax request. Outside of rails this is pretty trivial, but I'm having a hard time getting this to work. Does anybody have any suggestions or examples?
Thanks
There's really no need for what I was trying to do... it ends up I can just use the form_tag helper and multiple submit_tag helpers to create the submit buttons with different values. See this post for details: How do I create multiple submit buttons for the same form in Rails?
Also, here is a great write up on the javascript portion (it uses coffee script, but I didn't have any trouble following it even though I'm using jquery): http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/working_with_javascript_in_rails.html
I am not able to understand the flow on this page
how they are doing in MVC http://demo.nopcommerce.com/onepagecheckout
till now i created only one button for one page (view ) or provide me some similar link or similar code so i can understand
i want to implement same in my application
Thanks in Advance
The page is using AJAX to achieve the effect. Let's go through how it works.
The page is divided up into four sections.
Billing Address
Payment Method
Payment Information
Confirm Order
Each section is treated separately and are likely rendered using partial views. Each section has it's own form. When the user fills out a section and then submits that section, the form is submitted to a particular action. The Billing Address section submits its form to /checkout/OpcSaveBilling, the Payment Method section submits its form to /checkout/OpcSavePaymentMethod and so on.
When these forms are submitted (asynchronously, remember), the server handles the business logic and the validation and returns a result in the form of JSON. The JSON describes what happened, i.e. the result of the validation (success or fail), any errors that occurred and also contains HTML that the page can use to redisplay that particular section.
How is this data being remembered? Sessions. When forms are successful in their submission, the form data is stored per user in the session data. This way the system knows each user's settings and also knows where they are up to in the process.
The final step, Confirm Order, doesn't bother sending any form data because the server already knows everything through the session information.
I am working on a web application that involves the user filling out a multi-step form that spans several pages. The form has tabbed navigation across the top (these links do not submit the current page) and a next button at the bottom (which does submit). I am considering several strategies for handling form submission/validation:
one action method and view per form page. When you hit next, it submits the form to the action method for the next page. If there are validation errors, you are redirected back to the previous page:
URL's are descriptive and can be copy-pasted
Only redirects in the error case
Since the redirect does not have the form data, we lose context about the submission which makes it hard to display certain error messages
The same validation logic works for redirecting the user if they try to visit a step in the flow that they aren't ready for yet
one action method and view per form page. When you hit next, it submits the form to the current page action. If there are validation errors, the same view is returned. Otherwise, we redirect to the next page action:
URL's are descriptive and can be copy-pasted
Redirects are very common (not sure if this is bad)
When displaying validation errors, we are in the same request as the form submission so we have full access to the invalid input
Have to pass additional context if we want the ability to, for example, add a "Previous" button which also submits
one action method for ALL pages. URL's contain additional context about the step being submitted (e.g. MyController/MyAction/{step}). The controller message selects which view page to return depending on validation and the current step.
URL's are not descriptive (e. g. if I submit step 1 to go to step 2, then the URL the user sees will be the same regardless of whether page 1 (invalid) or page 2 is returned
No redirects
When displaying validation errors, we are in the same request as the form submission so we have full access to the invalid input
A different method I haven't listed here
I have tried to enumerate what I see as some of the pros and cons of each method, but I would be interested to know:
What are other pros and cons of these methods? Are mine correct? Could some of the cons I've listed be designed around?
Is there a standard approach to this problem which I should be using? If so, why is it the standard approach?
I would highly recommend option 2 with a minor modification. You may want to think about also creating one view model per action/view as well. If you have one model that spans all the pages, validation will occur across ALL properties, meaning that even though the user can only edit part of the model on each screen, they could get validation warnings for properties they can't see. We did this recently in a project and it worked beautifully. You have to do some data manipulation in the back-end to combine everything back together, but it was worth it in the end.
As you said, your URLs would be deep-linkable, which means users can Copy/Paste, and more importantly, they can add the page as a favorite in their browser, allowing them to come back to the same place very easily. In my opinion this makes option 3 obsolete.
You will also benefit from the fact that all of your logic for navigation is occurring in one place. You'll have to store the state of the "wizard" on the client (which page you're currently on) so that your controller knows what to do on submit. You'll want to analyze the state of the wizard and make a decision for where the user needs to go next. If you go with option 1, you won't know where you "came from" and server-validation errors will be difficult to display to the client. This is a beautiful example of the POST - REDIRECT - GET pattern. Each page would have 2 actions, a GET that takes simple ids, and a POST which takes more complex models. Post the server, figure out where to go next, redirect to a GET.
Lastly, consider your previous button simply linking directly to the previous step, instead of submitting the form. Otherwise, the user could potentially get stuck on an invalid step. This happened to us and again, worked very nicely.
Hopefully this was helpful. Good luck!
I have a view with two forms. A main form to create a new contact and another form to add a new folder (for organization).
Is it possible to get params for both forms to be set when one of the forms is submitted? Say, if a new folder is created I'd like to return to the view with any filled out contact information still there (or the other way around if the main form has errors).
Thanks!
It's a basic constraint of HTTP that a form submission only includes the values for the submitted form (which is, of course, a feature, not a bug).
Options to actually deal with your need:
If the two forms go to the same place, you could of course simply make them one big form; they can look like two forms visually without being two forms within the page
You could use javascript to populate one form with hidden fields representing the values in the other form. These could be updated either whenever the values change, or just before the actual submission takes place
Or (and this is what you should do, in my opinion) you could make both forms submit via AJAX rather then submitting the full page. That way, the form that hasn't been submitted won't change anyway, and there won't be any need to restore the values.
I'm trying to build a Rails app in which you can edit the same model from several different locations on the page. I want changes to be saved automatically every X seconds, with an option of manually triggering a save.
I have come up with a solution, but it seems very complicated, and I assume other Rails users have already faced similar questions.
The solution I came up with, is to have a hidden form on my page that is the one actually submitted, and then have multiple "dummy" forms scattered around the page that update the hidden form.
Once submitted, the hidden form updates the model, and the model contains logic to determine which RJS files should be returned in response. These are bundled up and sent as an update response.
some limitations:
Can't wrap the whole page in one form tag (there are multiple models/controllers on the page)
The same field might be editable from multiple locations
Anyone have a more efficient way?
create as much form as you need in your page even of the same instance of the same model
triggering the update would be either a javascript setInterval call, or onblur on your form fields.
your controller should be a REST one, and it will return success or error messages in json variables and a HTTP status (200, 422)
Forget rjs, think client side. Each form in your page will be submitting the form to the update method of your controller. The javascript submitting the form will have a error or success callback which will then show the success or error messages. The idea is that the javascript sending the form "knows" which form it is currently submitting, and it should be able to show error or success by itself dependending of the form it is submitting, it's not the controller job.
Saving the whole page is just serializing all the fields from all the forms and sending it to the update method. (see serialize)