Newbie on rails, need some help :D

Rails
1

Hello, thanks for reading.

I used scaffolding to set my pages up, and I’ve been editing them to get
the effect that I want, but I’m running into a few problems.

The first problem:

I have 2 drop down menus, with pre-determined choices, let’s say, “Ruby,
Python, Java” are in the first drop down, and “Is awesome!, Sucks, etc.”
are in the second. I then want to concatenate them with a space in
between, and have that as the input into my database. Currently I have:
<%= f.select(:part1, List::NAME) %>
<%= f.select(:part2, List::TYPE) %>

Where NAME is the first list, and TYPE is the second, they’re defined in
the list model. The drop down lists work, but I have no idea how to go
about concatenating “part1” and “part2”, and nothing that I’ve tried
works.

Second problem:

I want another drop down list, except that I want the choices to be from
another table in the database. In other words, I have a table called
users, which just has two fields: id and name. I want every user name to
come up in this list. The name itself is also what I want to be saved to
the database for that entry.

I’ve been programming for a while, and just started picking up Ruby a
few months ago, and I completely love it. This is my first time working
with web apps, and it’s been pretty challenging so far, and I’m hoping
that I can get the hang of it soon. Thanks anyone for the input!

2

Newbie Onrails wrote:

Hello, thanks for reading.

I used scaffolding to set my pages up, and I’ve been editing them to get
the effect that I want, but I’m running into a few problems.

The first problem:

I have 2 drop down menus, with pre-determined choices, let’s say, “Ruby,
Python, Java” are in the first drop down, and “Is awesome!, Sucks, etc.”
are in the second. I then want to concatenate them with a space in
between, and have that as the input into my database. Currently I have:
<%= f.select(:part1, List::NAME) %>
<%= f.select(:part2, List::TYPE) %>

Try
<%= f.select(:part1, {List::NAME, List::TYPE})

Where NAME is the first list, and TYPE is the second, they’re defined in
the list model. The drop down lists work, but I have no idea how to go
about concatenating “part1” and “part2”, and nothing that I’ve tried
works.

Second problem:

I want another drop down list, except that I want the choices to be from
another table in the database. In other words, I have a table called
users, which just has two fields: id and name. I want every user name to
come up in this list. The name itself is also what I want to be saved to
the database for that entry.

<%= collection_select(:post, :user_id, User.all, :id, :name) %>

I’ve been programming for a while, and just started picking up Ruby a
few months ago, and I completely love it. This is my first time working
with web apps, and it’s been pretty challenging so far, and I’m hoping
that I can get the hang of it soon. Thanks anyone for the input!

3

Bohdan P. wrote:

Try
<%= f.select(:part1, {List::NAME, List::TYPE})

<%= collection_select(:post, :user_id, User.all, :id, :name) %>

Thanks, neither of these exactly worked the way I wanted them, but it
did help me with googling what I was looking for.

For the first one, I just kept the same code, but added in the
controller

params[:list][:full] = params[:list][:part1] + " " +
params[:list][:part2]
right before
@list = List.new(params[:list])

in the create method.

All of the creating stuff works perfectly now, but I’m having trouble
with edit.

The drop down Name list is already picking the right name, which is
good, but the other one isn’t.

Right now, the code is:

<%= f.select(:part1,List::NAME,{}, {:size=>5}) %>
<%= f.select(:part2,List::TYPE,{}, {:size=>5}) %>

Each select has 5 options, so I opted to just use a select field instead
of a drop down. I tried adding :selected=>“Ruby” to the first one, but
it didn’t do anything. I believe that the current values which should be
defaulted can be found by full.split(" ")[0] and [1], but not really
sure how to implement that here.

Thanks again for the response =) I think I’m starting to get a better
feel for this.