Creating button to run function

Rails
1

Hi all,

I’ve got a feeling this is a quite simple question, but after searching
for an answer don’t know where to start!

What I’d like in my app is to have a button, that the user can press,
which then runs a function, and then refreshes the page. The function
itself will go off and look at another url, and possibly save some data,
but I haven’t got that far yet, I cant even get it to run a function.

my view code (index) looks like this

…
<%= button_to(“BAnd Name”, :action => ‘search_url’) %>
…

my controller code has the ‘search_url’ function

def search_url

render ‘index’

end

loading the page gives the error

No route matches {:action=>“search_url”, :controller=>“edinburgh”}

which suggests it’s trying to go to the page edinburgh/search_url, I
dont want it to do this, just run the function, then render index again,
is this possible?

Should I be using a different function to search_url?

Or am I missing something very basic about how websites receive
commands, does every function I execute have to be run from a url
address?

What if I want to pass in arguments to the function, such as
{:action=>“search_url(:bandName => ‘The Beatles’)”} is this possible??

so many questions, sorry just don’t know where to begin!?

2

Thanks for your help Colin, I’ll do a bit more basic research before
getting back to the problem in hand! M

3

On 2 December 2010 18:31, Michael B. [email protected] wrote:

my view code (index) looks like this

Should I be using a different function to search_url?

Or am I missing something very basic about how websites receive
commands, does every function I execute have to be run from a url
address?

You got it. All the browser can do is access a url on the server. So
in a rails app everything is done via actions in a controller.

What if I want to pass in arguments to the function, such as
{:action=>“search_url(:bandName => ‘The Beatles’)”} is this possible??

You can pass params to a url (as is done with show, edit and so on,
here the id is passed). It would be coded :action => search_url,
:bandName => ‘The Beatles’.

so many questions, sorry just don’t know where to begin!?

I think maybe you need to do some research into basic html and how the
web works (have a look at w3schools maybe). Then have a look at the
Rails Guides, starting with Getting Started obviously. Then maybe
move on to some tutorials such as railstutorial.org.

Good luck

Colin

4

Colin L. wrote in post #965787:

On 2 December 2010 18:31, Michael B. [email protected] wrote:

my view code (index) looks like this

Should I be using a different function to search_url?

Or am I missing something very basic about how websites receive
commands, does every function I execute have to be run from a url
address?

You got it. All the browser can do is access a url on the server. So
in a rails app everything is done via actions in a controller.
[…]

Just to clarify this point for the OP, let me state explicitly that this
is just the way the Web works. The browser only sends HTTP requests to
the server (for specific URLs) and processes the results. It has no way
of knowing (nor should it care) anything about the nature of the
server-side application.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]