Redirecting to create new page with input

Rails
1

Rails 3.1.3

I believe this is a very very fundamental question, but since I am new
to Rails, it’s more productive to ask someone to point out what I need
to do.

Say, I have a search method that generates a list of youtube videos. I
have completed this part.
And also, I have set up a database, Video, whose fields are video_title
and URL.

I need to place a button to each of these video outcomes.
My question is :

when clicking the button, how can I automatically send the URL of the
corresponding video and simultaneously redirect to NEW page where users
can create a new video entry??? In other words, in the creating new
page, the URL (and hopefully the video_title) is to be already filled
out.

I am thinking that I need to set “routes.rb” so that redirecting can
take
some values together. But routing is very confusing to me so far.

Could anyone help me out?

soichi

2

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 00:54, Soichi I. [email protected]
wrote:

when clicking the button, how can I automatically send the URL of the
corresponding video and simultaneously redirect to NEW page where users
can create a new video entry??? In other words, in the creating new
page, the URL (and hopefully the video_title) is to be already filled
out.

Let me see if I understand correctly what you want. When you say
“send the URL” you don’t mean that the user should be sent to that
page (whether in the same tab or window, or a new one), but simply
that that should be the pre-filled value on the “New Video” page.
Right?

There may be a more “Railsy” way to do this, but what comes to my mind
is:

Have the links link to #new, but add a parameter called something like
video_url. You could make it a URL parameter, so that rather than
going to myvideostore.com/videos/new, you’d go to
myvideostore.com/videos/new?video_url=YouTube
or whatever. (Actually the video_url should be url-encoded, but I
think Rails will handle that for you.) To do that, I think you can
pass a hash of params to link_to, or IWCTW you can tack it on
manually.

Or you can make them form params, so they don’t show up and look ugly
on the URL after the user clicks. Make a tiny form for each one.
Have the URL as a hidden field. Have the link submit the form, to the
videos_controller#new.

Either way, in the controller, after you call Video.new, set the
object’s url to params[:video_url]. Then when you display it, the
value should show up just fine.

Let us know how that works for you.

-Dave

–
Dave A.: Available Cleared Ruby on Rails Freelancer
(NoVa/DC/Remote) – see www.DaveAronson.com, and blogs at
www.Codosaur.us, www.Dare2XL.com, www.RecruitingRants.com

3

Thanks for your explanation. It is exactly what I wanted.

in search.html.erb, I added

<%= link_to(‘RegisterThisMovie’, {:controller => ‘video’, :action =>
‘new’, :url => y }) %>

‘y’ contains the url of the movie after executing the search.

in video_controller.rb, I added

def new
@video = Video.new
@video.url = params[:url] #<—HERE
respond_to do |format|
format.html # new.html.erb
format.json { render json: @video }
end
end

then it worked fine!
Thanks for your help.

soichi

4

Thanks again!

5

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 23:14, Soichi I. [email protected]
wrote:

Thanks for your explanation. It is exactly what I wanted.

Great! Now let’s take it to the next level. I think you can make it
a little more “canonical”. Instead of:

<%= link_to(‘RegisterThisMovie’, {:controller => ‘video’, :action =>
‘new’, :url => y }) %>

‘y’ contains the url of the movie after executing the search.

try:

<%= link_to( ‘Register This Movie’, new_video_path, :url => y ) %>

Also you can try getting used to the newer hash syntax, and do:

<%= link_to( ‘Register This Movie’, new_video_path, url: y ) %>

I’m not 100% sure off the top of my head that these will work, but it
should be at least close. :*) The built-in url helpers like
new_whatever_path, edit_whatever_path(some_object), etc. will save you
lots of typing and thus errors.

-Dave

–
Dave A.: Available Cleared Ruby on Rails Freelancer
(NoVa/DC/Remote) – see www.DaveAronson.com, and blogs at
www.Codosaur.us, www.Dare2XL.com, www.RecruitingRants.com