Question

As I am using Ruby on Rails to build an application, which only runs locally, I am lost in the woods (a nuby without a compass). I have a simple MVC application and my view is missing one thing I could really use. I want to select a local file just to retrieve it’s filename. I know it’s relatively easy to use the form tag helpers for uploading:

<%= file_field 'upload', 'datafile' %></p>

I wonder how I could get the filename from the selected file, without uploading the file.

Answer 1

You could use jquery. Just do something like

var name = $('my_input_id').val();
alert(name);

if you have to pass the name to your application you could just use jquery post to your controller. Your controller should be able to understand the format js (hint: respond_to).