We are thinking of open sourcing a gem and I am looking for feedback.
One of my team platforms contains a lot of “wizards” where we create a record In 5-6 steps. The user fills a few fields, then clicks next, then a few more fields and at the end they submit. Users can cancel the creation, they can continue at a later time, there is an option to return back to previous pages.
It’s been fun implementing it and we think of open sourcing it as a general purpose gem (MIT licence) as these are a couple of hundreds lines of code that I don’t want to reimplement for the next platform and I make the assumption they will be useful to the community as a whole.
The gem allows us to build a fully functional “wizard” for record creation in a few minutes.
I’m a looking for feedback - have you tried such solutions? would you like to use one? Is there something that I am missing? Do you think my assumption is correct and it will be useful?
I also have used wicked for years. How does your new gem tie in conditional multi-step validations? That’s always the tricky part. They’re on step 3 of 6 and can save something that really isn’t a valid record until they’re all the way through to step 6 situations.
This is pretty straightforward - the record is validated based on the state it is and the page you are. If the user is on 3 page we validate only the fields that should be valid until step 3. This allows us to save and continue later, like a day later from where you stopped, which is valid cases.
We use a React front end at my company and we built a wizard solution that I really enjoy using.
I’d love to have an easy-to-implement Rails solution for my own projects!
