I have a difficulty with something that makes me think I don’t
understand an aspect of Rails what. I’ve made a sort of blog site, and
under each article I show the comments and a comment form. The comment
model validates whether the user has entered his name. When he hasn’t, I
want to send him back to the form with his comment text still there.
In the comment/create action, I now have
if @comment.save
… (no problem here)
else
flash[:commentnotice]=“Comment could not be stored”
redirect_to :back
end
The problem is that after the redirect, the user gets an empty comment
form again and has lost his text.
In Rails tutorials, they generally use render instead of a redirect in
case of validation failure. That way the current contents of the
@comment object would be used to prefill the form and the user would see
his text. However, just rendering the same page again is difficult for
me for two reasons:
- the comment form can be under different kinds of pages (news posts,
photo albums, …) so to know which page to render I have to store the
page info in hidden fields of the form? or is there a better way - before I can render the page I have to call the controller action
that loads the article or photo album, but this will also create a new
comment for the comment form. I could just check if @comment already
exists?
If there is an elegant solution for this typical situation I’d be
grateful to learn about it. Tia!
