Any tutorials on how to do multiple row (data grid like) form?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I am trying to create a multiple row / data grid like input form and am not sure how to proceed. I am wondering if there are any good tutorials on how to do something like this.

To be more exact in what I am trying to do, imagine it is an expense report application in which a user has to enter the expense amount, a description, and select the category under which the expense belongs. The form consists of 5 rows, each row consisting of a field to enter each piece of information for a single expense. The form would also offer the user the chance to add or subject rows.

I am looking for a tutorial that covers both the view and controller side of doing this as I am fairly new to Rails.

Thank you for you help with this.

Chris Johnston

– www.fuzzylizard.com

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, Not when you have nothing more to add, But when you have nothing more to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

2

I think you may be looking for something like this:

<% form_for :expenses do |form| %>   <% @expenses.each_with_index do |expense, index| %>     <%= form.text_field(:amount, :index => index) %>     <%= form.text_field(:description, :index => index) %>   <% end %>   <% submit_tag %> <% end %>

then in the controller you should be able to access the data as a hash of hashes:

params[:expenses].keys.each do |index|   Expense.create(params[:expenses][index]) end

or however you want to handle that.

None of that is tested but I >think< that is the general idea.

Hope that helps! Tim

3

Cool, from reading through it, it looks like might just do it. Thanks.

Chris

4

Hi,

It isn’t working for me. Are there any good tutorials on putting together complex forms?

What I have is this:

Object A, in my example it is ExpenseReport. ExpenseReport contains several fields of its own like submitted_date, current_project, comments.

It also has a collection of LineItems which contains the amount, establishment, comments.

A LineItem contains an ExpenseType which is another model object. In the form, this would be represented by a drop down box. So the whole form looks something like this:

<% form_for :report, :url => { :action => ‘create’} do |form| %>

  <label for="report_project">Name</label>
  <%= text_field 'report', :project, :size => 40  %>

  <label for="report_submit_date">Report Submitted on</label>
  <%= datetime_select 'report', 'submit_date'  %>

    Report Line Item</legend>

   
      <% fields_for :line_items do |line_item_form| %>
        <% @line_items.each_with_index do |line_item, index| %>

          <% fields_for :expense_categories do |expense_category| %>

            <%= expense_category.collection_select(:id, @expense_category, :id, :name) %>
          <% end %>
         
          <%= text_field :line_item_form, :amount, :index => index %>

        <% end %>
      <% end %>

  <label for="report_comments">Comments</label>
  <%= text_area 'report', 'comments', :rows => 5, :cols => 60 %>

  <%= submit_tag "Create" %>

<% end %>

The problem that I am having right now is twofold; first, when I use the code listed below to extract the line_items and create those objects I am getting a ‘nil object’ error and second, in the params, there is only one listing for the expense_category instead of 5.

Anyone have ideas or tutorials they can point me to for this kind of thing?

Thanks, Chris