Filling form elements using Ajax

rubyonrails-talk
#1

Hello folks. I’m starting to Ruby on Rails and I have a doubt about a very straightforward application.

Suppose I have a form whose fields are all blank. On this same page, I have another form on which I can query for some information from my database.

Is there any nice way on which I can gather the query results and fill the first form’s fields with it using AJAX, without having to write handling functions in Javascript, only using Ruby ?

The closer I got from it was putting the first form inside a

and call form_remote_tag function, whose :action parameter was a function that wrote all form’s html code again (filling the fields).

I am thinking about writing a function that writes a xml document with the results instead of the whole html code for the form, then I would have just to write a single javascript function to handle it. But I wonder whether exists some ellegant way to do it in rails.

Thanks

Felipe

#2

I’ve just solved this problem creating a layout named _form2.rhtml with the source code of the first form and writing

render :partial => form2

in the controller, just after retrieving the information I needed. Very nice =)

Thank you all.

Felipe