A series of views (how to flow)

Rails
1

I just want to setup a series of pages so that a user clicks through to
create a new contact in my test app (a simple address book).

Such that the flow is like this for the user, each action is a new page.

NEW_CONTACT -> SELECT_CATEGORY -> TYPE_NAME -> TYPE_ADDRESS -> SAVE

that’s it.

Thing is I can’t quite figure how to do this.

Do I set up lots of actions and views.

e.g

def new
end

def select_category

I intend to find all the categories and display a list on the screen

end

etc…

And then a new view with a button_to action that redirects to the
select_category action?

How do I pass this record between actions.

I just can’t think of the right way to flow this and pass the new
records details between actions and views?

2

bingo bob wrote:

I just want to setup a series of pages so that a user clicks through to
create a new contact in my test app (a simple address book).

Such that the flow is like this for the user, each action is a new page.

NEW_CONTACT -> SELECT_CATEGORY -> TYPE_NAME -> TYPE_ADDRESS -> SAVE

that’s it.

Thing is I can’t quite figure how to do this.

Do I set up lots of actions and views.

e.g

def new
end

def select_category

I intend to find all the categories and display a list on the screen

end

etc…

And then a new view with a button_to action that redirects to the
select_category action?

How do I pass this record between actions.

I just can’t think of the right way to flow this and pass the new
records details between actions and views?

Hiya Bob,

A couple of different ways to acheive the solution you need:

You can have a action & view for each stage of the process. If you
submit back to the next action you take the new bit of information and
save it (either to session or to a temporary record in the database).
Once you reach the last action you do the final save for the data. You
could do a similar thing but use AJAX to build up each section which
would make the user experience a little better.

An alternative would be have one action and view with all the stages
that you require. You put each section in a seperate div and use
javascript to show or hide the relevent piece of form you want the user
to see. The advantage of this is you can send all the required data in
one submit, the disadvantage is a user could turn off css and see the
whole form in one hit or they might have javascript turned off.

Cheers
Luke

3

All things being equal which method would you favour?

Waht would be some example code, for either, how do i pass the details
from one action to another or use the javascript div hiding technique.

I think the div hiding technique sounds best but you wouldn’t have a
page progression (maybe that’s a bit old school though, not very web
2.0). I just thought I’d like to set up a series of pages like you
suggest with the details being built and then saved at the end (in the
last action).

4

I think that you could use a plugin like acts_as_wizard for your
purpouses.

http://blogs.smarteguru.com/2008/09/get-wizard-feel-with-acts-as-wizard-in-ruby-on-rails/

bingo bob escribió: