"new" form as partial?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi!

I think I'm trying to accomplish something very common, but I can't find a way to do it.

Creating a certain type of database record is a very frequent task in my application (or at least it should be ;-)). So I want to be able to place the form for creating that database record in practically any view, not just the /mymodel/new view.

I figured that this might be done using a partial, but since I'm pretty new to rails, I don't get it one.

Can anybody point me to a tutorial for this problem?

I'm using rails 2.3.5.

Thank you! Marian

2

I'm sure you can refactor code to fit almost anything into a single new/edit partial :slight_smile: But in my small experience the models are different enough so that having different views for different models makes the code more readable. That said, I almost always share new and edit for a model in a partial:

e.g. new.html.erb <%= render( :partial => "form", :locals => { :buttonname => 'Add' } ) %>

edit.html.erb <%= render( :partial => "form", :locals => { :buttonname => 'Update' } ) %>

_form.html.erb <%= error_message_on :lab, :base %> <% form_for ..., do |f| %>     <%= f.submit buttonname %> ... <% end %>

Ryan Bates has great screencasts on this sort of thing, and I found his Mastering Rails Forms Pragmatic Bookshelf: By Developers, For Developers ($5 a video) to be a great start.

Craig

3

Assuming you know the basics of rendering a partial within a view (if not look at the guides at http://guides.rubyonrails.org/) then all you have to do is include a path in the render partial to tell it where it is. render :partial => "/somefolder/form" will look for views/somefolder/_form.html.erb

Colin