I am a newbie to RoR and am trying to learn Rails by developing some simple applications, following various tutorials. I hope someone can help me over the following bump in the road.
I developed a page that lists a collection of "posts", displaying the names of those who posted. On this page I would like to place an input field that "filters" the results when the page is resubmitted.
I had no trouble adding <%= form_tag({:controller => "posts", :action => "index"}, :method => "get") do %> <%= submit_tag("Apply Name Filter:") %> <%= text_field_tag(:user_name) %> <% end %> to the view and adding if params[:user_name] == nil or params[:user_name] == '*' @posts = Post.all else @posts = Post.where("name = ?",params[:user_name] ) end to the controller-- but this is not what I want.
I want to add a select input field that lists all the names of all the users in the system so the user can simply choose the name to use as a filter. The list of all names may not be the same as the collection passed to the view -- especially if I ever get this filter working!! -- so I want to fetch them all from the database when populating the select field.
I replaced the text input field with <%= collection_select(:post, :name, Post.select(:name).uniq, :name, :name) %> and indeed generated a select list of unique names... but I do not know how to code the controller test. Indeed, I end up with a parameter named "post[name]" but cannot test that. Although the filter options are the collection of names, the select is not really tied to an object instance at all, and I would just name it "user_name" as I did with the text input field, if only I knew how to code the collection_select accordingly!
As you can see I am confused about the best way to do this. All suggestions are appreciated.
Alan
