Multi step forms

Rails
1

Hello,

Is there an elegant way to handle forms in a controller/view that
need to go thru multiple steps. Like 1) validating content, and 2)
adding a step like first accepting an Agreement?

Just wondering if rails had a way to handle this without me having
to post to the controller twice and render a view based on a hidden
form value (input type=hidden name=step value=2 kind of thing)

thanks
adam

2

Adam D. <straightflush@…> writes:

Is there an elegant way to handle forms in a controller/view that
need to go thru multiple steps. Like 1) validating content, and 2)
adding a step like first accepting an Agreement?

Just wondering if rails had a way to handle this without me having
to post to the controller twice and render a view based on a hidden
form value (input type=hidden name=step value=2 kind of thing)

I’m not sure if these are what you’re looking for, but here are three
tricks
I’ve used:

  1. As long as you put your validation in your models, you get all the
    cool
    validation effects (like feedback on the form telling people what they
    did
    wrong, bad fields being highlighted, etc.) for free–no need to do
    separate
    pages for validation. This knocks out a lot of the things you would need
    hidden
    fields for one one fell swoop.

  2. The Rails generators create CRUD scaffolding that uses two actions
    for some
    transactions that you could really do in with a single action (example:
    “new” to
    display a blank form to collect data, and “create” to accept that data
    and
    actually save it into the database). You can easily combine related
    operations
    like this into a single controller by triggering one operation if the
    action is
    called with HTTP GET, and the other if it’s called with HTTP POST. You
    write the
    action code something like this:
    def new
    if request.get?

    Code to display blank form, or whatever

    else

    Comes here for POST–put code to save form data here

    end
    end
    This trick basically just buys you the appearance of being on the same
    web page
    (because the URL doesn’t change), when in fact you’re executing and
    rendering
    completely different code.

  3. Create a second form for subsidiary data (perhaps like asking for
    acceptance
    of an agreement, as you were asking about) and put it inside an HTML
    “div”
    element with inline style set to “display:none;” so that it’s invisible,
    and
    overrides it’s main CSS styling. Use Javascript to take the main form’s
    “submit”
    button, and instead of submitting, wire it to use one of the cool
    Script.aculo.us effects in Rails to make your secondary form visible on
    top of
    the main form. You use Javascript on this secondary form’s “submit”
    button to
    make it submit the original form when clicked.

#1 and #2 are pretty straightforward and standard. #3 takes a little
more work,
and can be very impressive; lots of variations on that approach are
possible. To
see one example, take a look at the search box on the main
Script.aculo.us page
(http://script.aculo.us), and click on it’s “advanced options” link.

–Forrest

3

thanks forrest. Step 3 actually sounds like a really interesting way
to avoid multiple posts thru a 3 step form.

i assume the initial form’s submit button is actually not a submit
button , but just a “button” with an onClick handler that turns the
License Agreement div from display:none to display:block which also
producces a submit button.

I will try this out howevr i have run into issues where combining ajax
and forms starts preventing certain data from being submitted but i
will definitely give this a shot. thanks for the ideas.

adam