Nested forms

rubyonrails-talk
1

Can someone please point me in the right direction on what to do here, in terms of basic architecture. I;ve seen this type of interface before.

Let's say I have something that is "sold" and I have a form for the sold information. At the bottom of the form, say, us a little "plus sign" or something like that, with a notation after it that says "Customer", which then opens up another form, embedded in the sold form (in terms of the UI) to enter possible customer information for a second form, and that customer form may have another form embedded in it with a plus sign, etc. When I submit on an embedded form, it closes, taking me to its enclosing form, with a plus sign where the one I just submitted was.

The basic idea therefore is to 1. conserve screen space 2. not require you to redirect to another page for a form which is linked to by it;s enclosing form

Is there a standard library for this type of thing? (Im open to any ideas that satisfy these two points mentioned) If not, can you tell me how to create it? Thanks, Janna B

2

The short answer is that you cannot nest forms structurally. The standard prohibits. What you can do, and is easy to do if you learn a little CSS, is to nest them visually. Those are two completely separate issues.

Best reagards, Bill

3

Hello--

4

Im ok with the controller / model architecture....it;s the UI itself that I am trying to accomplish. Simply, a means to collapse forms on the screen is reallyt what I want. Thanks! Janna

5

http://www.prototypejs.org/api/element/toggle

$('your-sub-form').toggle()

will hide or show a given element. Just wrap your subform in a div
with a unique id and put a disclose link outside that div. You can
then use an onclick handler for that disclose link if you like the
inline JS route or by defining the behavior of the element in the
document.observe(''dom:loaded", ...) function.

hth