ajax complex forms: checkbox weirdness

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello!

Question for you wizards...

If you've used Ryan Bates tutorial on complex forms: #75 Complex Forms Part 3 - RailsCasts ... or better yet, the one from Advanced Rails Recipes... perhaps you can help me. I set up a complex form for an Account that has many Formats which works nearly the same as the ARR example of Project has_many Tasks. One thing that is breaking, though, is the use of checkboxes in the Formats partial.

The problem is that when I add a partial, Rails puts the hidden checkbox with value "0" in there... but this then gets passed in as another attribute set, so my virtual attribute methods bomb. For example, if I have a Format that has: Name (string), Description (text) and Active (boolean), then when I submit the form, I should get:

params[:account][:new_format_attribute] = [{:name => "foo", :description => "bar", :active => "1"}]

Instead, I get:

params[:account][:new_format_attribute] = [{:name => "foo", :description => "bar", :active => "1"}, {:active => "0"}]

You see? It's adding the hidden value of active in as a separate attribute hash.

Any ideas on how to skip this? Or should I just skip the Rails checkbox helper and code my own?

Thanks for any tips!

-Danimal

2

BTW, it's actually:

params[:account][:new_format_attributes] = ...

("attributes" not "attribute")... that was just my poor typing.

Thanks,

-Danimal

3

I don't suppose it's as simple as not calling the check_box helper from the form object you're getting out of fields_for is it? I would guess that's what would happen if you did...

4

I don't suppose it's as simple as not calling the check_box helper from the form object you're getting out of fields_for is it? I would guess that's what would happen if you did...

Nope, it's a known complication of the way the check_box helper works: it doesn't mix well with arrays. either use check_box_tag (but lose the convenience of having 0 submitted when the check_box is unchecked) or use a hash rather than an array.

Fred

5

*sigh* I wish there was an option on the helper. Oh well. I ended up leaving things as-is on the view and just handling it on the model. It's not ideal, but it works. Basically, as I read through the array of attribute hash sets, I only process them if it's a full set... i.e., in the above case, if there is no key :name (which is required), then I skip processing the hash.

Eventually, I might consider a better solution... perhaps overriding the checkbox helper to provide an option to suppress the hidden tag or something like that.

-Danimal