Say I am building a blogging platform, and I want to allow users to be
able to add an avatar without leaving the page, when they’re writing a
post. I need the avatar information to be included in the form for the
post. So for example, after a user adds a new avatar while writing a
new blog post, it would be available to be selected as the avatar to be
used for that post. What is the best way to go about this?
As I understand it, W3C standards don’t allow forms within forms. So I
have to find some way of adding the avatar without using a form within
the form I’m using for the blog posting. But then, I need the avatar
information to be within the post form.
I could do the avatar information using AJAX and a hyperlink, but if I
use GET, then I am violating the principle that GET operations shouldn’t
modify anything, and even if I specify :post => true for the link_to
function, this will still fail if the user’s browser doesn’t support
JavaScript.
So it seems like I can either create the form upon user action and
destroy it before the submit the blog post form… or I can create the
avatar form outside of the blog post form and have it modify a set of
form elements within the blog post form.
These last two options seem pretty messy… esp. the second because I’d
still want the avatar form to appear to be within the blog post form.
Am I missing something? I feel like I’m having a lot of trouble with a
seemingly trivial task here.
I’m a little confused as to the actual workflow/event logic you’re
trying to define, but from a pure HTML perspective, you can still POST
all the form values (blog_title, blog_body, avatar_name,
avatar_homepage, whatever) but just populate the form values when you
print out your response after processing the avatar creation. Or, in
quick-and-dirty PHP (I’m a RoR luddite, give me time :D):
myForm.php:
if(isset($_POST[‘create_avatar’]))
… insert new avatar record…
else
… display form again; the form values will contain whatever was in
them before the user clicked the create avatar
Ahh sorry, I guess I forgot a key requirement… I wanted it to be
AJAX’ed so that there would be no refresh from adding a new avatar.
Sorry about that!
gravy face wrote:
I’m a little confused as to the actual workflow/event logic you’re
trying to define, but from a pure HTML perspective, you can still POST
all the form values (blog_title, blog_body, avatar_name,
avatar_homepage, whatever) but just populate the form values when you
print out your response after processing the avatar creation. Or, in
quick-and-dirty PHP (I’m a RoR luddite, give me time :D):
Seeing as you seem to be fairly new to Web development, you might want
to get it working using “Web 1.0” methods first and then see if an
AJAX solution/pattern is truly what you want because AJAX (and in
particular javascript debugging) can be tricky, especially if you’re
still grasping Web fundamentals.
If you’re just trolling for someone to write code for you, I’d suggest
posting this to an AJAX mailing list – you might be lucky or someone
can point you in the right direction.
If you want to learn how to write AJAX, start by reading these
excellent articles from IBM Developerworks to get a handle on how AJAX
works and then you can decide whether you want to do that or not:
I’m not new to web development.
I know how to implement this without AJAX.
I’m not asking for someone to write code for me.
I’m just wondering if my thoughts on this are correct or whether there
is a simpler way that I am just missing.
gravy face wrote:
Seeing as you seem to be fairly new to Web development, you might want
to get it working using “Web 1.0” methods first and then see if an
AJAX solution/pattern is truly what you want because AJAX (and in
particular javascript debugging) can be tricky, especially if you’re
still grasping Web fundamentals.
If you’re just trolling for someone to write code for you, I’d suggest
posting this to an AJAX mailing list – you might be lucky or someone
can point you in the right direction.
If you want to learn how to write AJAX, start by reading these
excellent articles from IBM Developerworks to get a handle on how AJAX
works and then you can decide whether you want to do that or not: