Filling form elements using Ajax

Rails
1

Hello folks. I’m starting to Ruby on Rails and I have a doubt about a
very
straightforward application.

Suppose I have a form whose fields are all blank. On this same page, I
have
another form on which I can query for some information from my database.
Is there any nice way on which I can gather the query results and fill
the
first form’s fields with it using AJAX, without having to write handling
functions in Javascript, only using Ruby ?

The closer I got from it was putting the first form inside a

and
call
form_remote_tag function, whose :action parameter was a function that
wrote
all form’s html code again (filling the fields).

I am thinking about writing a function that writes a xml document with
the
results instead of the whole html code for the form, then I would have
just
to write a single javascript function to handle it. But I wonder whether
exists some ellegant way to do it in rails.

Thanks

Felipe

2

Sure,
but are you sure this is the right way to get what you want?

you can access any DOM element with the page hash.

ex:

html:

RJS:

page[:monkey].value = “likes bananas”

3

I’ve just solved this problem creating a layout named _form2.rhtml with
the
source code of the first form and writing

render :partial => form2

in the controller, just after retrieving the information I needed. Very
nice
=)

Thank you all.

Felipe