# IE not repopulating forms under Rails views - very odd **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 12, 2005, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ie-not-repopulating-forms-under-rails-views-very-odd/47512 "2005-11-12T12:49:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7ea924/32.png) [@tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tyler.kovacs)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ie-not-repopulating-forms-under-rails-views-very-odd/47512/1 "2005-11-12T12:49:17Z")
It is common practice to implement semi-persistent state across page views using hidden form fields since all major browsers repopulate the form fields with the last value of each field (provided that the browser hasn’t been closed). A longer explanation with samples is here: [http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/08/ajax-tutorial-saving-session-across.html](http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/08/ajax-tutorial-saving-session-across.html) There’s a very simple example at the bottom of that page that I’ve been able to recreate perfectly… until I try to get it to work in Rails under Internet Explorer. A working example is available here: [http://www1.zvents.com/test.rhtml](http://www1.zvents.com/test.rhtml) View the page source and hit reload a couple times to see the purpose of the page. It takes advantage of browsers repopulating form fields to achieve semi-persistent storage. If I take that EXACT same source and move it into a rails view rendered without layout, we get the following: [http://www1.zvents.com/events/test](http://www1.zvents.com/events/test) If you do a page source on each page, you’ll see that the source is identical. But for some reason, the persistence does not work in IE! Works fine in Firefox. I’ve tried this on Apache, lighttpd and webrick using both an existing and a fresh rails code base and nothing works. I’m completely out of ideas. Is there something about the way that Rails handles requests (routes? rewriting?) that is messing up IE’s ability to repopulate form values? I’ve also noticed that this affects all my regular HTML forms as well (again IE only). Any thoughts or help would be appreciated. Tyler ---
**Author:** ![tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7ea924/32.png) [@tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tyler.kovacs)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ie-not-repopulating-forms-under-rails-views-very-odd/47512/2 "2005-11-12T12:49:17Z")
This doesn’t help you with your exact problem, but I thought you might find it useful. This idea of maintaining short-term state in Rails is accomplished “the Rails way” by using the Flash hash to pass data. See the API docs: [Peak Obsession](http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Flash.html) ---
**Author:** ![tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7ea924/32.png) [@tyler.kovacs](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tyler.kovacs)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ie-not-repopulating-forms-under-rails-views-very-odd/47512/3 "2005-11-12T12:49:20Z")
Kyle M. \ writes: > This doesn’t help you with your exact problem, but I thought you might > find it useful. > > This idea of maintaining short-term state in Rails is accomplished > “the Rails way” by using the Flash hash to pass data. See the API > docs: [Peak Obsession](http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Flash.html) Thanks for the suggestion, but this is a slightly different kind of state. Since browsers normally persist information in forms across page views, you can use this to maintain client-side state information even when the browser leaves a page in question and then returns to it (normally using the back button). This approach is necessary if your application uses AJAX and you want to maintain state across page views. Tyler