Update attributes for multiple objects

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking and googling about this for the whole afternoon and I dont find the solution, but I know there must be an easy way (after all this is rails):

I have a page where user objects are listed (e.g. customers) and they have several attributes (like name, e-mail etc.) and a special attribute called contacted (which can be true or false depending on if this customer has been contacted by the sales people or not)

No big deal I thought, just write two controller methods 'set_contacted' and 'unset_contacted' and we are done by passing over the IDs of the corresponding objects. But then there came in two more attributes and I suddenly end up with 6 controller methods which feels horrible wrong to me (Not even to mention the DRY principle violation).

What I would like to do is the following using checkboxes and a form for the whole table and a submit button in order to save the changes made to the user objects

User | contacted user1 | user2 | user3 |

[ Save changes ]

You sometimes see a similar behaviour in Webmail clients where you can check serveral e-mails at once and then hit a delete button.

Any sort of help is appreciated! Have a nice week-end

Matt

P.S is it possible that submitting topics from the web interface of google talks does not work?

2

Matthias von Rohr wrote:

What I would like to do is the following using checkboxes and a form for the whole table and a submit button in order to save the changes made to the user objects

User | contacted user1 | user2 | user3 |

[ Save changes ]

If you have multiple instances of the same model in a form, you can refer to them like this:

<% for @user in @users -%>   <%= check_box("user", "contacted") %>   <%= check_box("user", "replied") %> <% end -%>

In the controller, you'll find that params[:user] is a hash of hashes that looks something like this:

{ 1 => {"contacted" => 1, "replied" => 1},   2 => {"contacted" => 1, "replied" => 0},   3 => {"contacted" => 0, "replied" => 0} }

where 1, 2 and 3 are the ids of the users.

You can then use that to update the user objects in one go:

User.update(params[:user].keys, params[:user].values)

Chris

3

Thanks a lot! Works like a charm!