form_for submit to a custom action

rubyonrails-talk
1

hi forum,

I am new to rails, and i am just getting my hang of things.

Problem, how do you pass content captured in a form to a custom method?

I have the following form:

  <% form_for :message, @message, :url => { :action => 'reply'} do |f| %>   <table cellpadding="4" cellspacing="5">     <tr>          <td>Content:<%= f.text_area :body %></td>     <tr>         <td><%= submit_tag "Send" %></td>     </tr>   </table>   <% end %>

this form is posting to a method called reply(), reply will need to take

the :body from the message, so the incoming request parameters look like this:

{"message"=>{"body"=>"this is the reply"}, "commit"=>"Send", "authenticity_token"=>"e2a058071a4037d85008f46b35818e160f5230ce"}

how do i retrieve "body"=>"this is the reply" from the request in the reply action?

any tips are appreciated!

~zonman

2

You can use a book on Rails like the one from Pragmatic Programmers. There are many nice features in the framework that need explanation and you are missing out on what Rails has to offer by hack and slash which constraints your thinking to the other frameworks you are used to.

To answer your question, assuming the form is for the object of type Message, you can do a xyz=Message.new(params[:message]) in your controller and access the attribute normally.

3

In general, the params hash (method 'params') is always available to your controller actions. You literally wrote how your params hash looks like (your incoming request parameters), so it's just plain Ruby code to retrieve the contents of the hash: params[:message] returns the hash {'body' => 'this is the reply'} so params[:message]['body'] would give you the string 'this is the reply'

Beside checking a Rails book, I found that most useful is a good grasp of Ruby itself (the 'pickaxe' book is a good start). You can learn Rails pretty much on the go, but good Ruby skills are really valuable to move on quickly.